Repurposing Rebellion: How Today’s Rebels Become Tomorrow’s Parties

Speaker: Sherry Zaks
While rebels' electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels' organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels' wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels' wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success. To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create sub-organizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation. This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN's subgroups-while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context-to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war's end.