Part-Time Rebels

How rebels sustain recruitment under state repression remains underexplored. Extending constituency-centric theories of conflict, I advance a principal-agent explanation of rebel recruitment focused on "part-time rebels": intermediaries who straddle civilian communities and rebel groups. Casting civilians as principals and rebels as agents, I argue that repression exacerbates principal-agent problems through negative divergences (rebel predation that undermines civilian trust) and positive divergences (rebels prioritizing longer-term goals over immediate civilian preferences). Part-time rebels mitigate these by holding fighters accountable, mediating civilian-rebel disputes, and justifying strategic decisions in ways that preserve trust, thereby sustaining recruitment under repression. I test two implications. First, groups with a substantial part-time rebel reservoir should rely less on forced recruitment under repression. Using data on the organizational origins of 327 groups to identify those rooted in civilian organizations, I find such groups are significantly less likely to escalate to systematic forced recruitment under repression, while others increasingly resort to coercion. Second, state neutralization of part-time rebels should hinder voluntary recruitment. Focusing on the PKK insurgency in Southeastern Turkey, I combine original spatial data on the state's killing of part-time rebels with fighter-recruitment data (1975-2012). Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, I find neutralizations significantly reduce recruitment growth at the province level. Together, the findings highlight the understudied role of peripheral actors in sustaining insurgent mobilization, with implications for rebel governance and counterinsurgency.