Insurgency group
An armed group that engages in insurgent operations to challenge an established regime. Insurgent groups may be defined by their political aims, their tactics, and their origins. They are distinguished from pure terrorist groups by their adherence to a political program and their use of violence that complements rather than replaces it. They also normally field fighting forces orders of magnitude larger than those of pure terrorist organisations.
The term insurgency group covers a range of armed groups with varying degrees of organisation and coercive capability. The most extreme examples are vanguards of global communism and a revived caliphate, but many insurgencies have more limited strategic objectives such as regional autonomy or replacement of one elite by another. In addition to military capabilities, insurgents need to socialise and politicise their cause among broader populations. This is usually achieved through forms of rebel governance that bind armed actors to local norms of legitimacy, even when their coercive capacity is modest.
The dynamics of insurgent mobilisation are complex and vary by context. For example, rebels that are primarily ‘state splinters’ tend to have a more comprehensive understanding of the regime from which they emerged and its internal workings. This knowledge allows them to impose more sophisticated forms of domination over local territory and their populations, including hybrid zones of dominance combining aspects of insurgent control with the legitimate monopoly on the use of force (Frerks et al., 2015). In contrast, armed groups with ‘movement’ and ‘insurgent’ origins have a more difficult time socialising and politicising themselves in urban environments because they lack this intimate familiarity with the local population. Their caution about surveillance and infiltration can lead to the development of a de facto social distance with their constituency, making it more difficult for them to sustain support for their activities.