UC San Diego

This dissertation project looks at how identity groups – groups that share either

ethnic, religious or regional characteristics – make allegiance choices at the outbreak of civil conflict. Specifically, I examine whether these groups join the government, the initiating rebel group or pursue self-government. Breaking with much past work on rebel groups that assumes that rebel leaders are autonomous strategic actors, I argue that the choice of whether to ally with the government, the rebels, or neither, can be a function of a non-strategic process: collective resentment toward out-groups. While resentment begins as a top-down mechanism generated by group leaders for personal gain prior to conflict onset, it evolves into a bottom-up mechanism as it integrates into group identity by the time conflicts begin and shapes collective individual preferences against joining with certain conflict actors. My project tests this argument across several levels of analysis. First, a cross-national statistical analysis shows that groups exposed to either violence or repression are less likely to join with the perpetrator of those actions at conflict onset. Second, the survey experiment in Lebanon links exposure to political messaging to resentment toward either the government or another sectarian group and resentment to individual allegiance preferences. Finally, a case study of Syria during the onset of the current civil war in 2011 and interviews conducted in Arabic with Lebanese political leaders show that leaders’ allegiance choices are shaped by the collective resentment of their identity group’s members. Together, the results indicate that group allegiance at conflict onset is not an exclusively strategic process, with considerable implications for future conflict research.