Kalyvas22, Laia works at Georgetown University, Stathis works at Oxford, 4/13/2022, PDF, “Revolution in Civil War: The ‘Marxist Paradox’”, file:///C:/Users/foxct/Dropbox/PC%20(3)/Downloads/SSRN-id4055392.pdf/) - FT
Research on civil wars has paid scant attention to a key (and variable) dimension of rebel political identity:some rebels are revolutionaries seeking to reshape their societies in radical ways. We study the most common strain of revolutionary rebels: revolutionary socialist or Marxist-inspired rebels; we find that despite ideological and contextual differences, they were “high capacity” actors in civil wars, able to rise against stronger regimes. Civil wars fought with revolutionary socialist rebels took the form of irregular or guerrilla wars, lasted longer, and produced more battlefield fatalities on average. At the same time, we also find that these rebels’ higher capacity failed to translate into victories. They were defeated at a rate that was no different from other rebels--hence a “Marxist Paradox.” We make sense of this paradox by pointing to the dynamic and world-systemic nature of civil wars: powerful revolutionary challengesengendered equally powerful and often successful counter-revolutionary reactions. An implication that follows from our analysis is that during the Cold War, revolutionary civil wars had a state-building rather than state-failing effect.
