The Fates of Rebels Insurgencies in Uganda Christopher R. Day Contemporary internal warfare produces insurgencies that exhibit a wide range of forms and mixed records of success. Some storm and occupy capital cities and gain interna- tional recognition, as with Uganda’s National Resistance Army (NRA), Chad’s Mouvement Patriotique du Salut (MPS), and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). 1 Yet the majority of modern rebels actually meet a number of fates short of full-blown victory. Many go barely noticed to outsiders and are swiftly crushed by the state, like Namibia’s Caprivi Liberation Army (CLA). Others, such as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), enter into a negotiated power-sharing agreement after years of rebellion. Some groups like Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) unravel due to their internal dysfunction. A few, such as Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), exhibit considerable staying power, evading defeat and refusing a political settle- ment with a state that only recently achieved a military victory. Some fighters get absorbed into different groups or recombine into new ones, and entire groups may change trajectory. But most insurgencies eventually settle into one of the above modal scenarios. This article provides a new comparative framework to explain the organizational variation of insurgencies that predicts their corresponding fates in civil wars. Rather than focus only on the rare successes, the framework extends the analysis to the outcomes of explosion, implosion, political settlement, and protracted conflict. Varying combinations of two structural factors produce different types of rebel groups, whose organizational configurations predict their outcomes. Figure 1 summarizes this framework. Rebel types are distinguished by their resources and their grievances, or reasons for resistance against the state. These types are in turn associated with a given level Figure 1 Framework for Explaining Fates of Rebels Nature of Resources Politico-Military Effectiveness Nature of Grievances Rebel Type Rebel Fate 439