GG CA APSA 2004
2
When they are in active rebellion against existing governments, guerrilla
organizations have to decide whether and how they will manage civilians living in
territories they control. In most civil wars guerrillas form some sort of administration for
the civilians who live in areas in which they are active. This aspect of rebellion against
an existing government has generally been overlooked by students of guerrilla war.
Thinking of guerrilla wars as three-sided, containing guerrillas, existing government and
civilians in the area of operations, allows consideration of surprising differences in
patterns of guerrilla-civilian relations. Relations between guerrillas and civilians vary
greatly from ad hoc connections to highly elaborate civil administration and from great to
little effort by guerrillas to control any administrative or political structures they
introduce. These variations greatly affect civilians living under the threat of competing
authorities during war.
For example, in areas in which they held the upper hand militarily, the Eritrean
People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)
developed elaborate and highly centralized systems of offices for regulating civilians,
though in application these varied among regions. In both cases, offices were set up to
replace the old government’s administrative network by organizing taxation, land reform,
dispute settlement, health care and political assemblies (Pool, 2001: 101-31, esp. 106;
Young, 1997: 172-96, esp. 172). In contrast, most of the groups that fought during the
1990s in the Liberian civil war did not discipline their fighters and thus suffered from
indiscriminate looting, raping or killing civilians that prevented any possibility of
creating extensive civilian administration (Ellis, 1998: 110-40, esp. 124, 143-44).
Convention