Some rebel groups abuse noncombatant populations, while others exhibit restraint. Insurgent leaders in some countries transform local structures of government, while others simply extract resources for their own benefit. In some contexts, groups kill their victims selectively, while in other environments violence appears indiscriminate, even random. This book presents a theory that accounts for the different strategies pursued by rebel groups in civil war, explaining why patterns of insurgent violence vary so much across conflicts. It does so by examining the membership, structure, and behavior of four insurgent movements in Uganda, Mozambique, and Peru. Drawing on interviews with nearly 200 combatants and civilians who experienced violence firsthand, it shows that rebels' strategies depend in important ways on how difficult it is to launch a rebellion. The book thus demonstrates how characteristics of the environment in which rebellions emerge constrain rebel organization and shape the patterns of violence that civilians experience.

In his trenchant analysis, Stephen Biddle ("Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon," March/April 2006) argues that the escalating violence in Iraq is not a nationalist insurgency, as was the Vietnam War, but rather a "communal civil war" and that it must therefore be addressed by pursuing a strategy different from "Vietnamization": if the United States were simply to turn over responsibility for counterinsurgency to the new Iraqi army and police forces, it would risk inflaming the communal conflict, either by empowering the Shiites and the Kurds to slaughter the Sunnis or by enabling a Trojan horse full of Sunni insurgents to penetrate the multiethnic security forces and undermine them.

Biddle is right in many respects. First, Iraq is already in the midst of a very violent civil conflict, which claims 500 to 1,000 lives or more every month. Second, this internal conflict has become primarily communal in nature; as Biddle writes, it is a fight "about group survival." It pits Sunnis against Shiites, in particular, but also Kurds against Sunnis and, more generally, group against group, with smaller minorities coming under attack on multiple fronts. Third, as Biddle warns, the current moderate-intensity communal war could descend into an all-out conflagration, with a high "risk of mass slaughter." Thus the United States cannot in good conscience withdraw from Iraq abruptly -- and doing so would not even be in the United States' national interest -- because that would remove the last significant barrier to a total conflagration.

External-led state building is at the forefront of international security governance; it has been called "a growth industry"; and it is, against the backdrop of the US-led intervention in Iraq, more controversial than ever. Since the end of the cold war, the UN have launched more than 60 missions in 24 countries. Whilst the primary objective of all of these missions was to monitor, keep, enforce or build peace, a second objective, which is intrinsically linked to the first, was to contribute directly or indirectly to the reestablishment of functioning state-hood. Peace-building mission have become state-building missions. There are two broad reasons for this. First, fragile states are seen as a risk to both their societies and to international security. And second, it is now broadly assumed that one vital condition for sustainable peace is that the state-apparatus has the capacity to exercise core functions of state-hood in an efficient, non-violent and legitimate way. Consequently, peace-building is more and more seen as state-building, and this evolution is reflected in both UN strategy documents, and the development aid strategies of most nation states.

It is against this background that the need for a systematic evaluation of successes and failures of external-led state building emerges. This in turn requires a framework that enables a cross-case comparison of outcomes of external-led state building efforts.

This paper has two objectives: First, I propose a framework that allows for the tracing of the absolute and the relative state-building progress of countries hosting a state-building operation. I argue that "success" should be disaggregated and measured along five dimensions: the absence of war, the reestablishment of a full monopoly over the means for violence, economic development, democracy, and institutional capacities. I discuss at some length the implications for data collection and proxying these measures of success. Secondly, I evaluate the outcome of 17 UN-led peace-building operations, using a new data set. I compare the successes and failures of state-building along these five dimensions against three hypothetical scenarios: The first one is "more is better." In this scenario, it is assumed that the more intrusive the intervention, the more successful the outcome. The second scenario can be called "less-is-more" and assumes that too intrusive missions are counterproductive, because they hinder the endogenous emergence of stable statehood. The third scenario is the "trade-off-scenario." Here, it is assumed that more intrusive interventions produce better outcome in some policy fields and worse in others. This then would point to existing trade-offs between different objectives of state building. Rather than assuming that all good things go together, in the "trade-off"-scenario the success in one dimension (for example democracy) comes at the expense of less success in another dimension (for example economic development).