Indirect Governance Rebel Support

A mode of rebel sponsorship where the sponsor provides purely material, financial, intelligence, or logistical support without hierarchical control instruments. The sponsor cannot directly monitor or sanction rebel compliance but benefits from plausible deniability and rebels' local legitimacy. Coded 1 in the binary DV; contrasted with delegation (0). Necessary support types: weapons, materiel/logistics, funding, intelligence.

A mode of rebel sponsorship where the sponsor provides troops, training, sanctuaries, or access to military infrastructure, enabling hierarchical monitoring and sanctioning of rebel compliance. Sufficient support types: troops (secondary warring party), training/expertise, access to territory, access to military infrastructure. Higher visibility increases domestic and international accountability costs.

Binary dummy indicating whether the ethnic group a rebel group claims to fight for is also politically relevant in the sponsor state. Matched using Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data, ACD2EPR, and TEK data. Coded 1 when co-ethnicity exists. Strongly increases probability of orchestration by substituting goal alignment for hierarchical control instruments.

Count of rebel groups (other than the supported group) fighting the target government in the previous year (lagged). Source: UCDP Dyadic Conflict Data. Creates a market mechanism: competition between groups disciplines rebel behavior, making orchestration viable without direct sponsor monitoring or sanctioning.

Sponsor's military expenditures (logged), from Correlates of War National Material Capabilities Dataset v5.0. Counterintuitively associated with MORE orchestration: powerful states can sustain credible shadow-of-hierarchy threats, can absorb efficiency losses from rebel non-compliance, and can exploit rebels' local legitimacy while still deterring defection.

The ability of a state sponsor to credibly deny involvement in supporting a rebel group. A key benefit of orchestration over delegation: lower visibility of material and financial support reduces responsibility attribution for rebel atrocities, international sanctions, and direct military retaliation by the target state. Eroded by visible troop deployments or training missions (delegation).

The trade-off faced by indirect governance principals choosing between hierarchical control and agent independence benefits. Delegation ensures compliance but forfeits rebels' local legitimacy and plausible deniability; orchestration captures independence benefits but sacrifices compliance guarantees. Borrowed from indirect governance theory (Abbott et al. 2016, 2020a, 2020b) and applied to state-rebel sponsor relationships.

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