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Abstract
This dissertation provides an explanatory framework for why contemporary rebel groups experience different outcomes in civil war. I place these different fates along a spectrum of survival and demise to capture a wider range of outcomes beyond success or failure, rebellion or non-rebellion. Survival occurs either through a political settlement or ongoing rebellion. Demise occurs through implosion or defeat. I argue that two structural factors of rebel groups make them more likely to experience certain outcomes than others. First, a rebel group's degree of embeddedness within state authority shapes group cohesion. Second, its degree of dependence on foreign state actors shapes how it collects and uses resources. Varying configurations of these factors shape rebel types, which are then associated with contrasting fates. I apply my typology to rebel groups in Uganda, Sudan, and Sierra Leone. My framework stands in contrast to scholarship on the general causes of civil wars and those explanations that focus on the goals and motivations of rebels and their supporters. Such approaches tell us little about what outcomes to expect from rebellion.
