Chapter 3 proposes an original conceptual framework built on gender and security studies and supported by existing international legal standards and norms to reframe the interpretation of the refugee definition and better reflect the nature of violence in armed conflicts. In doing so, it reasserts the Refugee Convention as the cornerstone of international protection. This chapter claims that the ongoing dynamics of violence in situations of armed conflict provide a more valuable lens to interpret the Refugee Convention definition where persons flee armed conflicts as it focuses on the nature of violence, including its continuum, features, application, direction, motivation and impact. A micro-level analysis of this type also enables the identification of gender dynamics that are essential in understanding violence in armed conflicts. The framework outlines the knowledge that should be incorporated into the process of interpreting the refugee definition to ensure effective protection of refugees fleeing armed conflicts. The chapter is broken down into the characteristics of contemporary armed conflicts and how these features relate to the refugee definition, including the temporality of armed conflicts, the rise of non-state actors, weak states, and the objectives, gendered strategies and tactics of fighting parties.

This chapter extends existing literature on property, political authority and state formation by focusing on the gendered aspects of ethno-territorial conflict. From late 1998, Solomon Islands was plunged into a period of conflict, and by 2003, it was regarded as a ‘failed state’. Militants made territorial claims that were grounded in highly gendered notions of culture and ethnicity, and in the aftermath of the conflict, attention has been devoted to consolidating these distinctions via a new constitution adopting a federal system. While ’the Tension’ has often been interpreted as exposing the fragility of state institutions and the tenacity of custom, this chapter argues that it must be understood as emerging from processes of state formation. These processes are profoundly gendered, and reproduce state norms and institutions as a masculine, even hypermasculine, domain. This is highlighted by the widespread gender-based violence perpetrated by militants during the conflict, which was not merely an effect of territorial claims, but constituted them, with devastating consequences for women, children and men who perceived and sought to express themselves differently.

This chapter examines evidence about when and where rebels formed in Uganda, and why nascent rebels’ initial use of violence is distinctive in its minimal nature – against both state targets and civilians. Quantitative evidence shows that the initial location of rebel group formation is not strongly associated with most factors linked to civil conflict onset in prior work and that rebels often start with sporadic, small attacks against the government. Qualitative evidence from interviews with former insurgents, counterinsurgents, and civilians supports the argument that a lack of explosive, frequent violence in the initial stages was not a mere reflection of rebels’ low capabilities. Instead, rebels’ desire to control the information environment shapes their decision about where to launch and their early uses of violence. The rebels’ initial acts are ambiguous in that the rebels refrain from vociferously and publicly taking “credit” for them, due to their desire to remain clandestine – and they serve an important purpose in gaining information about the adversary’s capabilities.

This chapter concludes by discussing the scholarly and policy implications of the book’s findings. First, it discusses implications for data on conflict onset, arguing that the book has shown that omissions in existing data prevent current work from learning about the start of conflict, and suggests avenues for generating better data. Then, it argues that these omissions have created major inferential issues in prior work about the role of ethnicity in conflict onset. It uses evidence from Uganda presented in prior chapters to show how this problem plagues data used in prominent study that found a strong relationship between ethnic exclusion and rebellion onset. Third, it argues that this book has shown the importance of civil intelligence institutions to state building and notes the thorny ethical issues associated with this finding. Finally, the chapter considers how the early stages of rebel group formation would differ in stronger state contexts, arguing that in such contexts barriers to new rebel entry are higher and thus we should expect rebellion to be more rare and more explosive.

This chapter examines evidence for the book’s arguments about the state’s behavior related to deterring and defeating new rebel groups. It shows that by developing institutions through which the central government learned fine-grained information about threats emanating from its territory, the post-1986 Ugandan state gradually gained an informational advantage relative to would-be insurgents. These institutions enabled the state to identify incipient insurrections and to “nip them in the bud” before they gained substantial military capacity. Extensive evidence from interviews with former rebel leaders, government intelligence officials, and civilians shows that the state’s ability to collect information about internal threats was an important component of prospective rebels’ calculations of whether or not to organize violence. This chapter’s focus on Uganda presents a rare opportunity to observe a transition from state fragility to relative stability. It also discusses the relevance of these arguments to other African countries.

This chapter provides context and description about rebel group formation in Uganda since 1986. Doing so supports several theoretical assertions from Chapter 2 about the strategic approach of initial rebel leaders and the initial conditions they typically face in weak states. The chapter first sketches the key events that led to Uganda’s exceedingly low state capacity in 1986, the year in which this book’s analyses of rebel group formation begins. It then describes the nascent Ugandan rebel leaders’ initial stated goals, their initial lack of strong ideology or material and organizational endowments, and the clandestine nature of their early days. It shows that in Uganda, it was small, secretive groups of rebel entrepreneurs – not large groups of intensely aggrieved, protesting citizens – who initially formed groups that aimed to use violence to challenge the state. The chapter also checks the relevance of these initial conditions of rebel group formation beyond the borders of Uganda, in several other Eastern and Central African states.

This chapter presents the book’s theory of rebel group formation. It argues that in weak state contexts, rebel groups typically start small and poor – and are therefore highly vulnerable to defeat. In an attempt to induce civilians to keep their secrets from the government, nascent rebels use early attacks and rumors to influence civilians’ perceptions of their capabilities and righteousness. Only in ethnically homogeneous localities are kinship networks structured in a manner that makes civilians susceptible to hearing and believing rebels’ rumors. Therefore, in ethnically homogeneous localities, rebels have a better chance of becoming a viable threat to the state’s authority. The chapter emphasizes that this theoretical account linking local ethnic homogeneity to rebel viability is quite different from those about ethnic grievances against the state. Instead, an implication of this theory is that grievances are not a necessary condition for ethnic rebellion, and in fact many grievances emerge out of the initial stages of violence. Another implication is that to deter and defeat nascent insurgents, states must build their local civil intelligence capacity.