Rebellion is an uprising that resists and is organized against one's government. A rebel is a person who engages in a rebellion. A rebel group is a consciously coordinated group that seeks to gain political control over an entire state or a portion of a state. A rebellion is often caused by political, religious, or social grievances that originate from a perceived inequality or marginalization. Rebellion comes from Latin re and bellum, and in Lockian philosophy refers to the responsibility of the people to overthrow unjust government.
Classification
Uprisings which revolt, resisting and taking direct action against an authority, law or policy, as well as organize, are rebellions. An insurrection is an armed revolt to change the government, its policies, or its politicians by force. If a government does not recognize rebels as belligerents, then they are insurgents and the revolt is an insurgency. In a larger conflict, the rebels may be recognized as belligerents without their government being recognized by the established government, in which case the conflict becomes a civil war. Civil resistance movements have often aimed at, and brought about, the fall of a government or head of state, and in these cases they could be considered a form of rebellion. In many of these cases, the opposition movement saw itself not only as nonviolent but also as upholding their country's constitutional system against a government that was unlawful, for example if it had refused to acknowledge its defeat in an election. Thus, rebel does not always capture the element in some of these movements of acting to defend the rule of law and constitutionalism. In contrast, an attempt for an overthrow of a government by—and installation of—a limited group of people is a putsch, and by an elite a coup d'état. If the existing system of society, like a government or its form is changed, it is most often called a revolution.
Causes
Macro approach The following theories broadly build on the Marxist interpretation of rebellion. Rebellion is studied, in Theda Skocpol's words, by analyzing "objective relationships and conflicts among variously situated groups and nations, rather than the interests, outlooks, or ideologies of particular actors in revolutions".
Marxist view Karl Marx's analysis of revolutions sees such expression of political violence not as anomic, episodic outbursts of discontents but rather the symptomatic expression of a particular set of objective but fundamentally contradicting class-based relations of power. The central tenet of Marxist philosophy, as expressed in Das Kapital, is the analysis of society's mode of production (societal organization of technology and labor) and the relationships between people and their material conditions. Marx writes about "the hidden structure of society" that must be elucidated through an examination of "the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers". The conflict that arises from producers being dispossessed of the means of production, and therefore subject to the possessors who may appropriate their products, is at the origin of the revolution. The inner imbalance within these modes of production is derived from the conflicting modes of organization, such as capitalism emerging within feudalism, or more contemporarily socialism arising within capitalism. The dynamics engineered by these class frictions help class consciousness root itself in the collective imaginary. For example, the development of the bourgeoisie class went from an oppressed merchant class to urban independence, eventually gaining enough power to represent the state as a whole. Social movements are thus determined by an exogenous set of circumstances. The proletariat must also, according to Marx, go through the same process of self-determination which can only be achieved by friction against the bourgeoisie. In Marx's theory, revolutions are the "locomotives of history" because revolution ultimately leads to the overthrow of a parasitic ruling class and its antiquated mode of production. Later, rebellion attempts to replace it with a new system of political economy, one that is better suited to the new ruling class, thus enabling societal progress. The cycle of revolution, thus, replaces one mode of production with another through the constant class friction.
Ted Gurr: Roots of political violence In his book Why Men Rebel, Ted Gurr looks at the roots of political violence itself as applied to a rebellion framework. He defines political violence as: "all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime, its actors ... or its policies. The concept represents a set of events, a common property of which is the actual or threatened use of violence". Gurr sees in violence a voice of anger that manifests itself against the established order. More precisely, individuals become angry when they feel what Gurr labels as relative deprivation, meaning the feeling of getting less than one is entitled to. He labels it formally as the "perceived discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities". Gurr differentiates between three types of relative deprivation:
Decremental deprivation: one's capacities decrease when expectations remain high. One example of this is the proliferation (and thus depreciation of the value) of higher education. Aspirational Deprivation: one's capacities stay the same when expectations rise. An example would be a first-generation college-student lacking the contacts and network to obtain a higher-paying job while watching her better-prepared colleagues bypass her. Progressive deprivation: expectation and capabilities increase but the former cannot keep up. A good example would be an automotive worker being increasingly marginalized by the automation of the assembly line. Anger is thus comparative. One of Gurr's key insights is: "The potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity". This means that different individuals within society will have different propensities to rebel based on the particular internalization of their situation. As such, Gurr differentiates between three types of political violence:
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