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The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE CIVIL WAR, GUERRILLA WARFARE, AND TERRORISM: UNDERSTANDING NON- STATE POLITICAL VIOLENCE THROUGH THE PHILIPPINES’ MORO CONFLICT ROBERT Y. CHEN Spring 2015 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in International Politics and Economics with honors in International Politics Reviewed and approved* by the following: Douglas Lemke Associate Professor of Political Science Thesis Supervisor Gretchen Casper Associate Professor of Political Science Honors Adviser * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i ABSTRACT Civil wars are traditionally studied as distinct from other forms of political dissidence. If a given political conflict does not reach a battle-related death threshold – a standard criterion for classifying a conflict as a civil war – it would fall out of most civil war datasets. I argue that this distinction is arbitrary, and that separating the study of civil war from the study of political conflict both limits and distorts our understanding of all forms of political conflict. In lieu of the separate study of different forms of conflict, I propose a framework from which to consider a particular form of conflict (self-determination) holistically, placing different non-state actor political strategies – terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and interstate war-like conventional warfare – on a spectrum, hypothesizing that actors choose their tactics based on their strength relative to their opponent, the government. In this way, we can understand when, where, and why a non- state actor seeking self-determination will employ terrorism as opposed to attempting to build a de facto state from which to challenge the government. I use the case of the 47-year Moro conflict in the southern Philippines to demonstrate the merits of an approach to understanding strategy choice in self-determination movements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... i LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv I. The non-state actor and modern political conflict ................................................................... 1 II. Non-state political violence and the southern Philippines ....................................................... 8 Guerrilla warfare without territorial control: The Moro National Liberation Front ............................... 17 Civil war as waged by a de facto state: The Moro Islamic Liberation Front .......................................... 35 Moro terrorism or apolitical crime? The case of the Abu Sayyaf Group ................................................ 69 III. Explaining non-state actor-government relations in the Southern Philippines ..................... 75 (1) The choice to rebel: non-violence vs. violent opposition ........................................................... 81 Grievance and opportunity .................................................................................................................. 81 More on opportunity: poverty, terrain, population, and political instability ....................................... 82 Opportunity, or lack thereof: ethnicity and exclusion from power ..................................................... 86 (2) The special circumstance of de facto states: interstate war theory and the MILF ...................... 90 Building a de facto state: power by way of ethnic identity and rebel coalitions ................................. 94 Geography and de facto state formation ............................................................................................. 96 Power parity, de facto states, and civil war ......................................................................................... 99 Domestic politics: “Rally ‘round the flag” and other benefits of military action ............................. 102 Passive state sponsorship of terrorism by a de facto state ................................................................ 104 IV. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 108 V. Appendix ............................................................................................................................. 111 Additional figures ................................................................................................................................. 111 Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................ 112 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 113 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Luzon and the Mindanao region (Google Maps) ............................................................ 8 Figure 2. Top- and bottom-10 provinces in life expectancy (years), 2003 (HDN 2005a, 19) ...... 10 Figure 3. Comparative poverty rates in the Philippines and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), 1997 and 2000 (Rabasa 2007, 119) ............................................................ 11 Figure 4. Estimated Moro and non-Moro population in Mindanao, 1903-1990 (Gutierrez 2000e, 318) ............................................................................................................................................... 12 Figure 5. Political map of Mindanao (Google Maps) ................................................................... 21 Figure 6. Map of central Mindanao, location of the MILF’s earliest base camps (Google Maps)41 Figure 7. Map of Muslim-dominated areas of Mindanao in 1998, including Camp Abubakar and the regions surrounding the Narciso Ramos Highway (Tiglao 1998, 27) .................................... 46 Figure 8. Organizational structure of the MILF military, the Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces (Pobre and Quilop 2009, 5) ........................................................................................................... 52 Figure 9. Location of the Buliok Complex, the MILF’s headquarters in the Liguasan Marsh of Central Mindanao (Pobre and Quilop 2009, 15). .......................................................................... 57 Figure 10. Clashes between the GRP and the MILF, 2002-2008 (Santos Jr. 2008b, 80) ............. 61 Figure 11. A translated ASG letter extorting Christians to pay the Jizyah, a tax on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands (Taylor 2010, 43) ................................................................................. 71 Figure 12. Percentage of adults with fewer than six years of schooling in the Philippines (HDN 2005a, 61). .................................................................................................................................... 83 Figure 13. Colonial roots of discrimination against Muslims in the Philippines (Abreu 2008c, 23) ..................................................................................................................................................... 111 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I first have to thank Professor Douglas Lemke, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. His advice has been invaluable to me ever since I walked into his office at the beginning of my sophomore year, having just made the switch into the International Politics major, to ask him if he needed a research assistant. I am grateful that he believed in me so early in my undergraduate career. I also want to thank my honors adviser and second reader, Professor Gretchen Casper, for being there when I was first considering a switch into International Politics. It’s been a great three years (four, if I count my time taking political science courses as electives) and I can’t even imagine how my Penn State career would have turned out if I hadn’t made that very good decision. And my closest friends at Penn State – you know who you are – I’ll use some words here to put in writing, forever, that I love you all and that you made my four years of college. I chose this university because I thought it’d be joining one of the biggest families in the world for the rest of my life. I don’t think I was wrong. I’ll be carrying my Philly accent that, somehow, has become even stronger in four years in central Pennsylvania and some pretty great memories with me for a long time to come. 1 I. The non-state actor and modern political conflict Interstate war – war between or among countries – is increasingly rare in the post-Cold War international system. It has been replaced in relative frequency and in political and societal significance by wars and armed conflicts involving non-state actors, which has driven the international political system to shift its attention from interstate war toward non-state war. That world powers are now more concerned with political violence perpetrated by non-state actors is evident in initiatives such as the U.S.-led “War on Terror,” precipitated by a non-state actor (al- Qaeda) and its September 11th attacks, and in countries’ response to the threat imposed by the cross-border war waged by the non-state Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). This paradigm shift in attention
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