Why do some individuals choose to participate in rebellion, and what recruitment tactics can rebel groups use to affect this decision? These questions are central to the study of civil war because rebel groups must raise troops in order to challenge the government and to survive as an organization. Indeed, much of the civil war literature builds on participation as a key causal mechanism, yet it is rarely specified in theoretical or empirical models. The dissertation attempts to open this black box by tackling three sets of gaps in the existing literature; these relate to the assumptions made in most studies, the theoretical bases for understanding participation and recruitment, and the record of empirical testing. Essay I examines whether a particular type of recruitment practice, ethnic mobilization, is associated with higher levels of violence. The results show that when rebel groups mobilize along ethnic lines, there is a higher risk for intensified violence. Essay II employs new data on rebel troop size to study what factors affect participation in rebellion. The findings indicate that concerns over personal security rather than economic and social incentives best explain participation. Essay III addresses coerced recruitment, positing that conflict dynamics affect whether rebel groups shift from voluntary to coerced recruitment. Using micro-level data on the conflict in Nepal, the results show that the more losses rebels suffer on the battlefield, the greater the number of individuals they subsequently abduct. Finally, the Nepal case study presented in Essay IV suggests that indoctrination as a recruitment strategy was more important to rebel leaders than other facets of the insurgency. Taken together, this dissertation indicates that there is analytical leverage to be had by examining not only the individual’s decision to participate, but also the rebel group’s recruitment strategy, and that these rebel strategies are flexible and contingent on conflict dynamics.

Forced recruitment has been found to retain members longer than voluntary recruitment. This raises a puzzle, both as coercion is costly, but also for allegiance. In most settings, tactics are dynamic over the course of conflict. Yet, prior literature has assumed these as static. Allegiance is further highlighted in prior research as key to success in forced rebel recruitment, but has rarely been measured as an outcome. This thesis seeks to contribute to these gaps in a twofold way, by theorising that a combination of physical and psychological coercive tactics in forced rebel recruitment affect the level of allegiance across rebel groups. The examined rebel groups are Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (LRA) and Mozambique’s National Resistance (RENAMO) in Mozambique. This is conducted by a qualitative, small-N study with a comparative case study method. The theory and hypothesis found some support in the empirical findings even though some discrepancies were identified. In general, a high and intense combination of physical and psychological coercive tactics were found to cause high levels of allegiance in LRA, whereas a lower and less intense combination were found to cause moderate levels of allegiance in RENAMO. Both relationships were reinforced by causal mechanisms of social identification.