Why Rebels Stop Fighting: Organizational Decline and Desertion in Colombia's Insurgency

Desertion, or the unauthorized exit from an armed group, has major implications for counterinsurgency, war termination, and recruitment dynamics. While existing research stresses the importance of individual motivations for desertion, organizational decline, in the form of military and financial adversity, can also condition desertion. Organizational decline undermines a group's instruments to channel individual preferences into collective action. These instruments include selective incentives, ideological appeal, and coercion. When the binding power of these instruments diminishes, individual desires start to dominate behavior, making desertion more likely. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency is used to examine this argument with a multimethod approach. First, a quantitative analysis employs unique data on more than 19,000 reported FARC deserters from 2002 to 2017, provided by the Colombian Ministry of Defense. Guarding against threats to causal inference, statistical analysis indicates that organizational decline drives desertion. Second, a qualitative analysis uses a large body of detailed reports on interviews with deserters conducted by Colombian military personnel. The reports demonstrate that organizational decline weakens selective incentives, group ideology, and a credible coercive regime, and fosters desertion through these mechanisms. These findings provide key insights for policymakers, given that desertion can both contribute to ending conflict and accelerate the recruitment of new combatants.

Under What Conditions are Students Willing to Protest? Selective Incentives, Production Functions, and Grievances

This article tests a theory of student protest based on collective action theories. Drawing on rational choice theories of selective incentives, critical mass theories of production functions, and social psychological theories of protest, the present article specifies a theory of willingness to protest. To test our model, we administer a factorial survey experiment of student protest to a random sample of undergraduate students. We find that both the perceived likelihood of a protest’s success and one’s intention to protest are affected by the magnitude of the grievance, selective rewards and punishments, and the number of participants. The latter effect suggests a decelerating production function. Finally, we find that the likelihood of success mediates much of the effect of social context on intention to protest, implying that actors consider the effects of incentives not only on their own behavior but also on the behavior of others.

Understanding gang-recruitment through selective incentives: the case of Honduras

Since their origins in the 1960s, criminal organizations in Latin America have been responsible for brutal acts of violence in the region. However, very little is known about the specific mechanisms involved in their recruitment tactics. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the use of selective incentives is widespread among gangs to compel membership.This essay considers both the shape and character of Honduran gang members and attempts to highlight the complex phenomenon of gang recruitment. I will advance a twofold approach of the selective incentives theory of rebel recruitment to identify the significant mechanisms at play in the recruitment of citizens to join violent gangs. Understanding the processes of recruitment involved in the Honduran case will potentially contribute to better plan and execute interventions to reduce gang violence in the Northern Triangle countries (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) and Latin America at large.

Theoretical views on the concept of «acquisition of membership» in the sociology of organizations

The article reveals the theoretical basis for the development of the concept of «membership in organizations». In sociology, the term "membership" is used in a broad (member of society) and narrow (member of a formal organization) sense. At the level of professional, totalitarian and bureaucratic organizations as social segments, membership is modified as «belonging status», organizational identity, subordination and involvement. Certain value principles are revealed, the formal implementation of which is guarded by the statute and the oath. Organizations decide, on the one hand, on the acquisition and termination of membership, and on the other on the transfer of members to various positions in the organization. Acquisition of membership turns the individual into a component of staff, which becomes the object of organizational decisions. The macro-sociological concepts of F.Tönnies, M.Duverger, T.Parsons, M.Olson present membership as a formal-bureaucratic procedure with limited and open access. Admission to the group, the organization is a preliminary investigation and establishment of the ethical value of the applicant and receipt after testing and testing of the approbation as a «full». Joining the organization or gaining membership in it is a complex procedure of social cooperation, mutual consent. You can join a closed organization only after a long probationary period and serious recommendations from the responsible guarantors, even passing an examination and filtration commission, providing evidence of sincerity and firmness of intention. There are groups with limited and open access, but the process of joining and leaving the group is determined by the nature of the goal that the group wants to achieve, not by some characteristics of membership. Thus, pressure groups (lobbying organizations) attract participants partly through subtle forms of coercion, and partly through the provision of selective incentives (legal and financial advice, advocacy of members of associations before the judiciary and law enforcement agencies). With the acquisition of membership in one organization, the individual receives formal isolation from a member of another organization. Members of a particular organization can be recognized by symbols (flag, emblem, slogan, etc.). Any organization can set its own restrictions or qualifications: age, availability of written recommendations, entrance fees. Active participation in membership not only deepens the experience of the individual and expands the potential of the organization, but expands its influence within the community, involving a wider segment of the community in organizational activities.

Intra-party conflict at grassroots: Party-councillor ideological congruence in Croatia

Party-councillor ideological congruence reinforces party linkages with local voters and credibility of councillors as future party elites. This contribution examines the role of career motivations and selective incentives, as well as party branch characteristics in forming party-councillor congruence. The empirical analysis draws on the original survey of Croatian local councillors. The results find councillors with progressive ambition and those exposed to intra-branch competition reporting higher levels of ideological congruence with their parties, while no effect was found for holders of upper level party positions. Branch power has the opposite effect from expected. Party grassroots shape ideologically congruent professional politicians, but this function is challenged by shrinking supply of candidates.

Collective Action

The theory of collective action, as outlined by Mancur Olson, is presented. Olson argued that individuals are subject to free-riding behavior, which can be overcome by selective incentives. The larger is the potential group, the greater the hurdles to successful formation. Thus, smaller groups with more narrow interests are more likely to form, leading to an emphasis on policy reform that concentrates benefits to the group while diffusing the costs on greater society. The accumulation of such groups will slow growth, and this sclerotic effect is reversed due to institutional instability. This chapter develops a critical appraisal of the theory and the accumulated evidence in the literature that follows from Olson.

Understanding participation dilemmas in community mobilisation: can collective action theory help?

Community mobilisation interventions have been used to promote health in many low-income and middle-income settings. They frequently involve collective action to address shared determinants of ill-health, which often requires high levels of participation to be effective. However, the non-excludable nature of benefits produced often generates participation dilemmas: community members have an individual interest in abstaining from collective action and free riding on others’ contributions, but no benefit is produced if nobody participates. For example, marches, rallies or other awareness-raising activities to change entrenched social norms affect the social environment shared by community members whether they participate or not. This creates a temptation to let other community members invest time and effort. Collective action theory provides a rich, principled framework for analysing such participation dilemmas. Over the past 50 years, political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have proposed a plethora of incentive mechanisms to solve participation dilemmas: selective incentives, intrinsic benefits, social incentives, outsize stakes, intermediate goals, interdependency and critical mass theory. We discuss how such incentive mechanisms might be used by global health researchers to produce new questions about how community mobilisation works and conclude with theoretical predictions to be explored in future quantitative or qualitative research.

Gang Joining

This article examines the who, what, where, when, why, and how of gang joining. The question of what youth join when they join gangs speaks to the contested nature of gang definitions and types and the consequences of gang membership, specifically heightened levels of offending and victimization. The type of gang and the obligations of membership influence the joining process. Where youth join gangs, namely, the neighborhood and social context, also impacts individual opportunities and preferences for joining. When youth join gangs is considered in a developmental sense, to include both adolescent and adult onset, in order to account for continuity and change in individual levels of immersion or “embeddedness” in gangs across the life course. Who joins gangs provides a profile of gang membership grounded in the well-documented risk factors for gang membership, but limited by problems of prediction. Why youth join gangs speaks to the push and pull factors for membership, the appeal of gangs, and the selective incentives they offer. Still, motivations for gang membership cannot fully explain selection into gangs, nor can general theories of crime that do not necessarily fit with general knowledge of gangs. How youth join gangs, for example, is more complicated than initiation rites. The mechanisms underlying the selection process can be understood through the lens of signaling theory, with implications for practice.

The Rise and Fall of the English Defence League: Self-Governance, Marginal Members and the Far Right

What determines the success or failure of far-right organisations? This article uses new qualitative data to explain the sudden rise and subsequent decline of the English Defence League, an anti-Islamic, street protest organisation established in the UK in 2009. We explain the rise and fall of the English Defence League through the lens of the theory of collective action to show that the English Defence League initially motivated activism by supplying selective incentives that were enhanced by the participation of others. The pursuit of ‘participatory crowding’ led to indiscriminate recruitment into the organisation that enabled numbers to expand into the thousands, but ultimately caused the English Defence League’s downfall because it resulted in the presence of large numbers of ‘marginal members’ with low levels of commitment whose subsequent exit was decisively destructive. Self-governance mechanisms to ensure greater loyalty from members could have prevented the English Defence League’s decline but would also have limited its initial success.