Insurgent Culture

Abstract

How do insurgent organizations form their strategies? Existing scholarship focuses on either strategic effectiveness or the exogenous conditions that produce specific strategies; there is significantly less work on how insurgents select between strategies or how those choices iterate into strategic change over time. The theory of insurgent organizational culture posits strategic preferences are produced by organizational culture. A significant body of scholarship analyzes the effect of organizational culture on state militaries and private businesses, but there has not yet been a systematic treatment of organizational culture’s effect on non-state militant organizations, i.e., insurgents. These organizations exist in a state of uncertainty, and their search for information is a powerful driving factor in the formation and evolution of their strategy. But there are a multitude of sources an organization can pull information from. Insurgent organizations differ in how they prioritize these different sources of information and how easily they are moved to change tact by new information; respectively, their embeddedness and reactivity. These two variable qualities comprise constitute insurgent organizational culture, which determines how insurgents convert information into strategy and strategic change. I use the Palestinian National Movement to develop this theory and weigh it against alternative explanations, comparing the organizational culture of Fatah, the PFLP, and Hamas. Analysis of primary sources and original interviews with key figures in Palestinian politics demonstrates these three organizations vary significantly in their organizational culture, leading to radically different approaches to strategy even under similar conditions and pursuing similar goals. Insurgent organizational culture theory shows that insurgent strategy is produced in an iterative process of rational updating rooted in organizational culture’s different prioritization of information and impetus for action under uncertainty; in so doing, it can explain variation in insurgent strategy more precisely than purely rationalist theories.