Repurposing Rebellion: How Today’s Rebels Become Tomorrow’s Parties | Sherry Zaks

About the Event: 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. 

About the Speaker: Sherry Zaks is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as an assistant professor of Comparative Politics and Methodology at the University of Southern California. Her substantive work examines the conditions under which rebel groups are able to transform into political parties in the aftermath of civil wars. She draws on organizational sociology to develop a comprehensive model of militant groups and trace how wartime structures either facilitate or inhibit rebel-to-party transformations. On the methods side, Sherry’s work focuses on conceptualization, measurement, and process tracing. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.