Woldemariam’s Book Highlighted in Washington Post

Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa: Rebellion and its Discontents (Cambridge University Press, 2018) by Michael Woldemariam, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was featured in a recent article on the historic shift in Ethiopia-Eritrea relations.

Woldemariam’s book was the focus of a July 20, 2018 article in The Washington Post entitled “There’s Been a Historic Shift in Ethiopia-Eritrea Relations, and This New Book Explores the Countries’ Rebellions.

From the text of the article:

Woldemariam’s book draws from the Ethiopian and Eritrean cases (as well as the Somalia case) to study why rebellions come apart, or “fragment.” He defines his core concept, rebel fragmentation, as “the splitting of rebel organizations into politically distinct, mutually exclusive entities, where these entities create a new rebel organization, join an existing organization, or join forces with the incumbent government.”

Why does it matter if rebel organizations come apart? Most obviously, rebel fragmentation is important to the survival of rebellions and subsequently, their eventual success or failure. Woldemariam reviews the broad literature on rebel fragmentation to identify other, perhaps less obvious, reasons: rebel fragmentation can influence the intensity of civil war violence, impact of violence against civilians, the duration of civil wars, state failure and postwar behavior of insurgent groups, e.g., when they have transitioned into political parties.

To study rebel fragmentation, Woldemariam compiled an original data set on 171 African rebel organizations that operated between 1946 and 2006. In his analysis of publicly available sources, Woldemariam finds a third of these rebel organizations fragmented at least once, with some fragmenting multiple times.

Woldemariam conducted years of research in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, Europe and North America. His deep case studies of Ethiopian and Eritrean rebel organizations draw on more than 85 interviews with ex-combatants, ex-government officials and civilians who lived through the conflict, as well as thousands of pages of archival material. One chapter in the book studies the Somali civil war, drawing on more than 40 interviews with government officials, rebel organization veterans and NGO employees who engaged with rebel organizations.

In Insurgent Fragmentation in the Horn of Africa, Woldemariam examines how when insurgent organizations factionalize and fragment, it can profoundly shape a civil war: its intensity, outcome, and duration. The book, aimed at audiences interested in insurgent groups and conflict dynamics, is a rare effort to examine these issues in the context of the Horn of Africa region, based upon extensive fieldwork