How do international audiences evaluate the legitimacy of secessionist insurgencies? Although secessionists often propagate their behavioral choices, such as state-building and non-violence, to international audiences in the hopes of generating support, scholars know little about the effects of this information. In this article, we use survey experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom to examine how international audiences respond to two commonly used strategies of secession: civilian killings and social service provision. We find that international audiences view secessionists who avoid civilian killings and provide social services as more legitimate than secessionists who kill civilians and do not provide services, respectively. Further, we show that service provision can allow secessionists to reduce—and, in some cases, eliminate—the public costs of civilian killings. These findings have important implications for ongoing secessionist conflicts across the globe.

In January 2018, a commander of the Syrian Kurdish Women’s Protection Units published an op-ed in the New York Times imploring the United States to support the Kurds in their fight against Turkish military inquests (Derik, 2018). The commander appealed to the US public by noting that the Kurds had built “a haven for anyone fleeing the terror of the civil war” and developed their own own democratic institutions. She emphasized that the Kurds support refugees and have “established local councils so that all can participate in the decisions affecting their neighborhoods and communities. We hold independently monitored elections and ensure that women and all ethnic groups are strongly represented in governance.” By publishing an editorial in one of the highest circulating American newspapers, Kurdish rebels in Syria appealed directly to the American public—not just American diplomats—emphasizing their commitment to inclusive democratic institutions and refuting Turkish claims that Kurdish fighters were “terrorists.”

These state-building and terrorism-avoiding strategies—and efforts to publicize them—reflect the wartime actions of numerous contemporary and historical secessionist insurgencies (Stewart, 2018; Huang, 2016a; Fazal, 2013). Secessionists believe that engaging in and publicizing these behaviors will increase international legitimacy (Stewart, 2018; Huang, 2016a; Jo, 2015; Fazal, 2013), which may promote the secessionists’ ultimate goal of international recognition (Seymour, 2017; Heraclides, 1990). However, existing research focuses overwhelmingly on how secessionist behaviors affect the opinions of local civilians in the area of conflict (but see Huff and Kruszewska, 2016). As a result, we know little about the extent to which secessionists’ strategic behaviors affect international public opinion.

In this article, we examine how international audiences respond to information about two commonly used strategies of secession: avoiding civilian predation (Fortna, 2015; Fazal, 2013; Kalyvas, 2006) and social service provision (Stewart, 2018; Arjona, 2016; Mampilly, 2011). We focus on secessionist insurgencies because these groups are especially reliant on the international system for recognition (Huang, 2016a; Jo, 2015; Fazal, 2013; Coggins, 2011; Mampilly, 2011). Building on previous research into foreign policy attitudes, we argue that secessionists can cultivate legitimacy among international audiences by avoiding killing civilians and by state-building. Further, we argue that state-building allows secessionists to reduce the public costs of killing civilians among international audiences.

We test our expectations with survey experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom. The experiments, which resemble news media coverage of international insurgencies (e.g., Derik, 2018; Hammer, 2016; Fuller, 2012; Wax, 2012; Gray, 2007), randomize the information provided about real life secessionists’ record of violence against civilians and state-building before measuring multiple dimensions of legitimacy (Marquez, 2016). Consistent with our argument, we find that secessionists who avoid killing civilians and who provide social services are viewed as more legitimate than groups that target civilians and do not provide services. Moreover, we find that violent and non-violent behaviors interact to shape international evaluations of legitimacy: while international audiences view groups that use indiscriminate violence as less legitimate than groups that avoid violence, this negative violence effect is reduced—and, in some cases, eliminated—when services are provided and as these services become more inclusive.

These results make a number of important contributions. First, they improve our understanding of the effectiveness of historical and contemporary attempts by secessionist rebels to cultivate support by highlighting their tactical choices (see, for instance, Bob 2005).1 Second, our findings help us better understand possible constraints on policymakers. Although citizens are unlikely to make vote choices based on overseas secessionist conflicts, research suggests that citizens do have consistent preferences about foreign policy (Kertzer and Zeitzoff, 2017), preferences that constrain and shape foreign policy decision-making (Levendusky and Horowitz, 2012; Fearon, 1994).

Our findings also have important implications for ongoing secessionist conflicts across the globe. Specifically, they suggest that the public costs of using violence against civilians are not insurmountable for secessionists. Indeed, secessionists can reduce or eliminate these costs through social service provision. Although international legitimacy does not guarantee recognition, foreign policy preferences may constrain and shape elite behavior (Levendusky and Horowitz, 2012; Fearon, 1994): a government could provide humanitarian, military, or political support to a secessionist group, or, alternatively, it could reduce support for the state the secessionist group is fighting. By elites, we mean individuals who have extensive information about foreign policy (e.g., policymakers) and are well positioned to influence the foreign policy attitudes of less informed individuals (Zaller 1992). For example, in the United States, members of the Democratic (Republican) Party increasingly sympathize with Palestinians (Israelis) in the long-standing conflict between these two states (Pew Research Center, 2018). These trends could increase pressure on elected officials to alter the extent or type of aid offered to both Israel and Palestine. While pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli shifts in U.S. policy may not result in the formation of a new state, such shifts are profoundly consequential for Middle East policy. This article sheds light on how citizens are likely to form preferences about their government’s actions toward international secessionist conflicts.

Results In both studies, we tested our hypotheses by estimating an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. The models regressed respondents’ perceptions of the legitimacy of the KNU (Study 1) or OLF (Study 2) on binary indicators for violence, restrictive service provision, and inclusive service provision. (The omitted baseline categories were no violence and no service provision, respectively.) We also included interaction terms between violence and the two levels of service provision.10 As we discuss below, our tests of Hypothesis 3 relied on the interaction between violence and service provision. Therefore, following Pepinsky (2018), we present regression results in table form, which allows readers to easily discern the statistical significance of the interaction, and also present a marginal effects plot, which illustrates the magnitude of interaction effects.11 We discuss the evidence for each hypothesis (in both studies) in turn, beginning with Hypothesis 1, which posits that violence will decrease the perceived legitimacy of international secessionists. We tested this hypothesis by examining the effect of violence on legitimacy evaluations when no information about social services is provided. (Below we consider how this effect changes when information about service provision is provided alongside information about violence.) The top row of Table 2 shows strong support for Hypothesis 1 across both studies. Compared with the group that does not commit violence against civilians, the violent group is viewed as less of a legitimate alternative to the existing state in both Study 1 ( β = − 0 . 64 , p < . 01 ) and Study 2 ( β = − 0 . 42 , p < . 05 ).12 These results suggest that committing violence against civilians has consistent negative consequences for perceived legitimacy. Table 2. OLS regression models predicting legitimacy evaluations (studies 1 and 2). View larger version We now turn to Hypothesis 2, which suggests that perceived legitimacy will increase as service provision becomes more inclusive. Here we consider the effects of service provision among groups that are described as non-violent (we discuss the joint effects of service provision and violence below). As discussed, the simplest test of Hypothesis 2 is whether groups that provide restrictive or inclusive services are viewed as more legitimate than groups that do not provide services. As shown in the second row of Table 2, restrictive service provision has a positive effect on perceived legitimacy in both studies, though this effect is statistically significant in Study 2 ( β = 0 . 41 , p < . 05 ) and insignificant in Study 1 ( β = 0 . 31 , p = . 13 ). Similarly, the effects of inclusive service provision are positive in both studies, but again significant in Study 2 ( β = 0 . 40 , p < . 05 ) but not Study 1 ( β = 0 . 11 , p = . 58 ). Following our discussion above, we conducted an exploratory analysis examining whether inclusive services have a larger positive effect on perceived legitimacy than restrictive services (i.e., whether β 3 > β 2 ). In both models in Table 2, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of no difference between these service provision coefficients (Study 1: p = 0 . 33 ; Study 2: p = 0 . 96 ). Collectively, these results suggest that service provision has a consistent positive effect on perceived legitimacy; however, citizens do not appear to distinguish between groups that provide services restrictively and inclusively. Finally, we considered our key hypothesis (H3), which posits that the negative effects of violence on legitimacy will be attenuated as service provision becomes more inclusive. We present the estimated effect of violence conditional on various levels of service provision and 95% confidence intervals (in both studies) in Figure 1. In both studies, the statistical significance of the violence/service provision interaction is indicated by the (in)significance of the relevant interaction term in row 4 or 5 of Table 2 (Pepinsky 2018). Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint Our tests of Hypothesis 3 in Study 1 are displayed in the left panel of Figure 1. As shown in the left-most bar in this panel, the estimated effect of violence on perceived legitimacy among groups that do not provide services is negative and highly significant (95% CI: [ − 1 . 00 , − 0 . 27 ] ). By contrast, the estimated effect of violence is indistinguishable from zero among groups that provide any governance. As shown in the middle bar in Figure 1, among groups that provide restrictive services, the 95% confidence interval around the estimated violence effect is [ − 0 . 14 , 0 . 64 ] . Among groups that provide inclusive services, this interval is [ − 0 . 45 , 0 . 37 ] . Consistent with Hypothesis 3, these patterns indicate that the public cost of killing civilians decreases as service provision becomes more inclusive. Indeed, the significant interaction between violence and inclusive service provision in the left column of Table 2 confirms that service provision does significantly reduce the effect of violence on perceived legitimacy. Turning to the results from Study 2, which are presented in the right panel of Figure 1, we see that the negative effect of violence on legitimacy is more consistent here than in the previous study. In particular, the negative effect of violence on legitimacy is not significantly attenuated as service provision becomes more inclusive. Consider the magnitude of the negative violence effect under each of the three levels of service provision. As shown in the left-most bar in this panel, secessionists that provide no services incur a significant penalty for committing violence against civilians (95% CI: [ − 0 . 78 , − 0 . 06 ] ). As shown in the middle bar in the same panel, groups that provide restrictive services pay a similar penalty (95% CI: [ − 0 . 84 , − 0 . 08 ] ). Finally, groups that provide inclusive social services appear to pay a slightly smaller penalty for killing civilians (95% CI: [ − 0 . 58 , 0 . 15 ] ). Regression results in the right column of Table 2 confirm the lack of a significant interaction between violence and service provision in this study. We therefore found support for Hypothesis 3 in Study 1 (the United States) but not in Study 2 (the United Kingdom). As a whole, Hypothesis 1 was in the predicted direction and was statistically significant across both studies. While the results of both studies were consistent with directional expectations of hypotheses 2 and 3, the statistical significance of these effects were mixed across both studies.

Conclusions In this article, we examined how violent and non-violent strategies of secession affect the opinions of important international audiences who are frequent targets of secessionist propaganda. We focused on secessionist insurgencies because they are fundamentally reliant on the international system for political support and material resources. Using survey experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom, we demonstrated that social service provision can allow rebels to decrease—and, in some cases, eliminate—the public costs of killing civilians. Inclusive service provision—a special case of rebel governance in which services are provided to both supporters and non-supporters of the insurgency—appears especially powerful, as it allowed both groups in our studies to completely eliminate the negative effect of killing civilians on legitimacy.13 As discussed above, we found that the magnitude of the negative effect of violence on legitimacy was more responsive to changes in secessionist tactics in Study 1 (United States) compared with Study 2 (United Kingdom). Put differently, service provision helped a rebel group reduce the costs of violence in the eyes of American subjects (study 1), but not among subjects in the United Kingdom (study 2). Although we do not have the data necessary to explain these divergent patterns across countries, we view this as an important topic for future research. In particular, scholars should consider the contexts in which rebel groups can successfully use service provision to reduce the public costs of violence (e.g., types of services provided, type of violence employed, country-level factors, etc.). Broadly, our findings underscore the effectiveness of service provision for shaping international public opinion (Coggins, 2015; Huang, 2016a) and improve our understanding of the incentives facing rebels when deciding among several strategic behaviors. While our results suggest that state-building and non-violence cultivate international legitimacy, the relationship between legitimacy and recognition remains mixed (Coggins, 2011, 2014). As a result, secessionists who provide services or engage in non-violence may enjoy increased legitimacy but remain unrecognized by dominant states. Secessionists thus receive mixed messages from the international system that have important implications for policymakers responding to ongoing conflicts: if secessionists recognize that state-building and non-violence do not always result in international recognition, they may abandon these behaviors, which could result in more violent civil wars with weaker governance apparatuses to mitigate the humanitarian fallout that frequently accompanies domestic conflict (Fazal, 2018a, 2018b). Of course, the experiments reported here are not without limitations, many of which may be addressed in future research. First, although our experiments focused on two commonly used strategies of secession, rebels often use other forms of violence (e.g., rape, torture) and governance (e.g., compliance with international law, taxation, elections) that may affect international perceptions of legitimacy. Future research should consider the extent to which our findings generalize across other tactics that secessionists frequently employ. Second, certain populations that are highly invested in foreign conflicts, such as diasporas or elite policymakers, may react differently to information about secessionist tactics. Future research should assess how these populations evaluate parties in civil wars. Third, non-secessionist rebels engage in similar governance behaviors as the ones we have studied here. Future research should investigate whether the effects of social services and violence we found are similar for non-secessionist groups. Finally, building on the multi-country data presented here, we again urge future researchers to evaluate the contexts in which rebel governance affects the opinions of important international audiences.

Acknowledgements Authors are listed alphabetically and both contributed equally. We thank Ethan Busby, Jamie Druckman, Jin Woo Kim, Rana B. Khoury, Thomas Leeper, Julia Macdonald, Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifler, Jake Rothschild, Jackie Schneider, Richard Shafranek, Salma Al-Shami, and participants at the 2016 meeting of the American Political Science Association and the 2017 meeting of the International Studies Association for helpful comments

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Study 1 was supported by a Qualtrics Behavioral Research Grant. ORCID iD

Megan A. Stewart https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6074-9142 Supplemental materials

The supplemental files are available at http://rap.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data/DOI:10.1177/2053168018810077. The replication files are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/EY5GID

Carnegie Corporation of New York Grant

This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.