Rebel actors and legitimacy building

Contemporary conflict studies often cite actor "legitimacy" as a key mechanism linking rebel actors to a variety of outcomes, including civilian targeting, recruitment practices, and war termination. This article advances a conceptualization of legitimacy as a dynamic process of triangulation among rebels, their potential local constituents, and the international community. Rebels derive or lose legitimacy from the local population, but also from external audiences, which have played a central role in supporting peace processes in many conflicts. We explore conceptually a myriad of ways that rebels work to create and maintain legitimacy in the context of ongoing conflict, identifying the target audiences of these tactics. These are illustrated with an in-depth study of the Moro rebellion in the Philippines.