1 Internationally, leaders benefit from selling their rebellion as legitimate to potential backers, and a public-benefits message can help in this regard ( Jo 2015). Locally, they benefit from appealing to large numbers of people who they can mobilize as fighters or supporters who will provide food, shelter, and information to the rebel group ( Kalyvas 2006 Weinstein 2007). Leaders, trying to build a viable armed group that can pose a realistic threat to the state, benefit from broad buy-in, both locally and internationally. Framing the struggle in the broadest possible terms is strategically valuable from a mobilization and recruitment perspective ( McAdam 2010 Thomas 2012). When rebel groups launch a rebellion, they typically frame their fights as struggles to achieve broad reforms or public benefits for the whole country or a large segment of the civilian population that they claim to represent. Using a variety of statistical tests and accounting for nonrandom selection into peace agreements, we find strong support for our hypothesis. We test this argument using original data on the design of all final peace agreements reached between 19, and several proxies for the group's level of reliance on civilian supporters. In particular, leaders of groups that are more civilian-reliant for their military and political power are more likely to sign agreements that favor broad benefits for civilian constituents, while leaders who do not depend on civilian support for their political and military power will sign agreements with fewer public benefits. It argues that constituents, fighters, and rebel elites have different preferences over the terms of peace, and that rebel leaders will push for settlements that reflect the preferences of whichever audience they are most reliant on and accountable to. When do rebel leaders “sell out” their constituents in the terms of peace by signing agreements that benefit group elites over the rebel constituency, and when do they instead “stand firm,” pushing for settlement terms that benefit the public they claim to represent? This article examines variation in the design of civil war settlement agreements.
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