Global Dynamics

Chapter 10Rebellions

Peter Baudains, Jyoti Belur, Alex Braithwaite, Elio Marchione and Shane D. Johnson

10.1 Introduction

Rebellions frequently arise around the globe and have received considerable attention from the academic community. Data-driven studies have traditionally analysed such civil conflicts at the country-year level (e.g. Gurr, 1970; Fearon and Laitin, 2003) and rarely explicitly model the interaction between rebels and the state (although there are notable exceptions, such as Toft and Zhukov, 2012, 2015). In this chapter, we contribute to an emerging literature on the temporal dynamics of rebellions by using a point process framework to model the evolution of the Naxal rebellion within the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh at a daily level of resolution. We model the occurrence of Naxal attacks and police counterinsurgent actions as a coupled point process, which enables us to consider the level of interaction between the two sides of the conflict.

The Naxal movement, whose name is taken from the small village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, where a peasant revolt took place in 1967, is a left-wing extremist group who have engaged in numerous attacks against civilians and the state in recent decades. Grievances of the Naxal movement initially stemmed from economic inequality and rural agricultural workers' inaccessibility to land ownership (Ahuja and Ganguly, 2007). After being quashed by the Indian government in the 1970s through the use of police and paramilitary ...