RECOMENDACIONES Y TRABAJO FUTURO

The communist insurgency in the Philippines provides leverage to study territorial control in irregular civil wars. Since independence, the central government has grad-ually expanded its reach into the periphery. But, ultimately the Philippines remains a weak state with developing urban centers, while state-building has lagged in the largely subsistence or small-scale agriculture communities far from centers of state military and bureaucratic power.

The CPP-NPA has capitalized on the state’s lack of service provision to court popular support in marginalized communities. At the height of the insurgency in the 1980’s, the CPP boasted over 30,000 party members, while the NPA comprised near 20,000 armed personnel active in 50 provinces and “controlled or influenced about 20 percent of the Philippine population” in the mid-1980’s (Kessler 1989, p. 28). Over the past decade, the NPA has been most active in the Davao and CARAGA regions on the island of Mindanao. According to an International Crisis Group (ICG) 2011 report, the CPP-NPA had approximately 300 guerrillas in 9 active Fronts in the CARAGA region, most active in Agusan del Sur, and approximately 800 guerrillas in 15 Fronts in the Davao Region, most active in Compostela Valley. The main activities of the NPA in Davao Region were fundraising and intermittent military operations against the AFP. The report cites AFP estimates of approximately $890,000 worth of revolutionary taxes collected in Davao Region in 2010, nearly half of the

approxi-mately $2.15 million collected in the entire country that year.³

Crucially, the time period for which the AFP intelligence data on communist territorial control is available corresponds precisely to the window in which the AFP has shifted from a predominantly enemy-centric towards population-centric counterin-surgency strategy. This provides the opportunity to examine the conditional effect of community collective action capacity across variation in counterinsurgent strategy and tactics. Furthermore, the time frame represents a weak point in the insurgency, providing a hard test for the accountability theory. Because counterinsurgent strength is, overall, much greater than insurgent strength and the state’s reach extends further into the periphery than at any point in the history of the conflict. In other words, the sub-sample of villages in which the NPA has the capacity to seize territory is limited.

If the positive relationship between community collective action capacity and terri-torial control holds even in this context that is especially hostile to rebel territerri-torial control, this increases confidence in the generalizability of the theory.

The Philippines is a linguistically, ethnically, religiously, and geographically di-verse and fragmented archipelago. Local communities, tribes, and kingdoms have long coveted autonomy from other groups and have greeted outsiders’ efforts to an-nex or centralize political authority with suspicion as an affront to freedom (Kessler 1989, p. 5). Rival tribes and foreign conquerors in the pre-colonial era, Spanish and American colonial governments, and elite dynastic Filipino families/clans attempting to centralize power in Manila following independence have all confronted widespread and decentralized resistance. In other words, the Philippines has a deep cultural and political history of political power at the local level.

3These figures are reported in the International Crisis Group Asia Report N^◦ 202, “The Com-munist Insurgency in the Philippines: Tactics and Talks,” February 2011.

Local polities continued to resist authorities in Manila even after the Philippines was declared independent. Because the Spanish and American colonial systems insti-tutionalized power in the center, favoring national elites in Manila, local communities and tribes either rejected the new state or leveraged ties with Manila as a means to bolster their own local autonomy. This fragmentation of power to the local level provides a context conducive to testing the accountability theory of rebellion, as local communities represent a politically relevant unit of analysis within which civilians may attempt to hold political authorities accountable to collective interests.

The importance of family networks to collective action capacity is by no means unique to the Philippines. In fact, in Kalyvas (2006), family feuds play a fundamental role in the theory of selective and indiscriminate violence in civil wars: “malicious”

denunciation for private ulterior motives is common in cases as varied as the Greek Civil War, Viet Nam, the Spanish Civil War, Guatemalan civil war, the Iraq war, and others (Kalyvas 2006, p. 179-180). In these cases, conflict between families over land, honor, and resources drives the flow of information to the conflict belligerents.

In some conflicts, the local cleavages pertinent to collective action capacity may man-ifest at higher levels of social organization, such as tribal, ethnic, or religious identity.

Though the cleavages may differ across cases, the role of collective action capacity for civilian-rebel interaction remains salient.

The inferences drawn from examining this case generalize most directly to other ideological conflicts in weak states; especially communist insurgencies such as ongo-ing conflicts in India and Colombia and numerous historical communist insurgencies throughout the world. But the dynamics of rebel-civilian interaction illustrated in the case apply more broadly to other ideologically motivated, center-seeking rebel

groups attempting to overthrow the incumbent regime. This would include groups such as the Taliban, ISIS, Christian radicals like the LRA in Uganda, and other groups advancing politicized religious ideologies. Though there are crucial differences in the political philosophies, religious ideological groups likewise advance a gradual advancement in territorial control and movement legitimacy at the state’s expense by convincing the population to support an alternative political system with the ul-timate goal of regime overthrow. While not always purely fence-sitters, a majority of communities may plausibly support either side in the conflict.

The findings may not generalize as well to ethno-nationalist secessionist groups, especially those representing marginalized groups without recourse to align with the state. However, even in identity conflicts political allegiances are fluid, as demon-strated in Kalyvas (2006), and communities may still choose to align with a state dominated by an ethnic out-group if the state’s provision of services and protection exceed that expected under co-ethnic rebels. Identity-based conflict add a layer of complexity to the population’s outside options. Future research will engage with the extent to which the accountability theory applies in ethno-nationalist conflicts.

4.2 Government Administrative Data