Information, rebel organization and civil war escalation: The case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam

Current literature on civil war is well aware of the importance of defection by rebel members for civil war dynamics, including that of ethnic defection. However, scholars have not closely examined the effects of defection on civil war. In this article, I argue that rebel members’ defection and resultant information leaks to the state increase the likelihood of the state’s military escalation through their effects on three aspects of conflict: the efficiency of the state’s offensives against the rebel group; the efficiency of the state’s defenses against rebel group’s offensives; and the level of uncertainty for the state in war. These effects of defection, however, are conditional on the credibility and consequentiality of the information from the defectors. The utilities of the alternative courses of action for the state also matters. The theory is applied to the case of civil war in Sri Lanka to explain the state’s initiation of Eelam War IV, which ended with a swift and thorough state victory. An implication of the theory is that the experience in Sri Lanka is not easily replicable elsewhere. The findings have implications to the studies of the duration and termination of civil war as well as to the studies of the use of violence against civilians.