Insurgency Success Factors and Rebel Legitimacy
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY
This chapter is organized into three sections intended to provide an extensive overview
of literature, thought, and methodology relevant to this analysis. Section one assesses
contributions and gaps in current literature on legitimacy in rebel groups. Section two builds on
contributions and gaps in existing literature on rebel success in conflicts. Section three presents a
detailed overview of the paper methodology, framework development, and case study
application.
The complexity of the perception, measurement, and determination of legitimacy,
success, and the Chechen context warrants an examination of context from a variety of
backgrounds. Gaps in literature on legitimacy and Chechnya produced a need to incorporate non-
academic sources to more comprehensively place legitimacy and the Chechen rebellion in
context. As such, sources were assessed from various sectors, including academic literature,
counterinsurgency (COIN) manuals, development reports, and policy analyses.
It is important to note several key challenges in examining literature on Chechnya. First,
accurate, neutral sources on the Chechen rebellion are limited after 2000. Russia's restriction of
media and foreign access to Chechnya in 2000 drastically reduced external access to Chechnya
and subsequent research, media, and policy analysis coming from the region ¹². From 2000 to
2007, state media outlets, rebel propaganda sites, and accounts of foreign humanitarian
organizations with restricted regional access, produced the vast majority of information on
Chechnya¹³. While limited, these sources can still produce key aspects of information. For
example, the Chechen extremist site Kavkaz.org is often used by foreign journalists and policy
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