#Not All Marxists: Disrupting the Left-Right Spectrum in Militant Group Ideology

• In Event: Identity and Narrative as Conflict Process

Abstract

"All Marxist rebel groups..." is a terrible way to start a sentence. Any substantive claim that follows will either be inaccurate or tautological. Yet, existing conceptions of militant group ideology confine us to this dilemma. The problem is that our left-right notion of ideology is at once useful and misleading. On the one hand, individuals' placement along the spectrum is a (mostly) reliable heuristic for their policy and candidate preferences. On the other hand, it reduces a complex set of preferences about the way and means by which society should be structured to a single dimension.
This paper makes the case for disrupting the ideological spectrum (and our conventional understanding of rebel group ideologies) when characterizing militant organizations' worldviews and practices. To do so, I introduce the concept of meso-ideology: the logically consistent set of organizational values and practices that result when a broad doctrine is filtered through an organization's decision-making body in a particular context. After demonstrating where existing notions of ideology miss critical nuance across conflict dynamics, I derive a conceptual framework of meso-ideology. Then, I propose a number of organizational characteristics and conflict dynamics that meso-ideology can help us get analytic traction on.
Finally, I demonstrate its empirical utility through intra-organizational comparative process tracing in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation front in El Salvador. Specifically, I I demonstrate that meso-ideology better explains core differences in the organizational structures that the rebels build during the conflict. Since the FMLN was an umbrella of five organizations with five distinct structures, it is especially well-suited to testing the utility of this concept. I conclude with a discussion of future research agendas that can stem from this concept.

systematically disaggregates Marxism to derive testable propositions

Author

• Sherry Zaks, University of Southern California