One Variable to Confound Them All: How Rebel Social Origins Shape Ideology, Warfare, and Macro Dynamics of Civil War, and Why Marxist Rebels Are High Quality

Recent civil war scholarship has increasingly highlighted rebel ideology and warfare type as key drivers of conflict dynamics. Building on this literature, I argue that many of these findings overlook a crucial confounder: the pre-conflict social origins and power of rebel leaders. This omission matters because rebel social origins strongly shape both the rebel ideology and the way wars are fought (warfare). Ignoring this structure produces misleading inferences about the causal role of Marxism or irregular warfare. I develop a new typology distinguishing elite-led from non-elite-led civil wars and show that once this distinction is incorporated, several well-known empirical patterns shift. Non-elite groups are far more likely to embrace Marxist ideology and to fight irregular wars, not because ideology or guerrilla tactics inherently produce certain outcomes, but because non-elites begin conflicts with limited resources and few strategic alternatives. Once we account for this, the estimated effects of Marxism and irregular warfare on duration, victory, and severity weaken or disappear entirely. This framework also resolves the “Marxist Paradox” identified by Balcells and Kalyvas. They argue that Marxist rebels appear organizationally high-quality yet do not achieve higher victory rates. I show that this paradox stems from selection: most Marxist groups originate from non-elite backgrounds, and only an unusually capable subset ever manages to escalate to civil war. When social origins are controlled for, Marxist rebels are in fact more likely to win. Empirically, I pair global statistical analysis (1945–2020) with original data on all armed groups active in Turkey during the 1970s, supplemented by a structured comparison of the PKK and the failed Dev-Yol insurgency. The results demonstrate that rebel social origins constitute an overlooked but central determinant of civil war dynamics.