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³⁷ Other categories include intelligence, communications and training (Byman, Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements).

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⁴³ The UCDP/PRIO project defines an opposition organization as ‘any non-governmental group of people having announced a name for their group and using armed force to influence the outcome of the incompatibility [of goals and positions].’ A conflict is defined as ‘a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths.’

⁴⁴ We exclude inter-state wars from our analysis since our theory pertains to warring parties in civil conflicts. According to the PRIO dataset, internationalized civil conflicts occur ‘between the government of a state and one or more internal opposition group(s) with intervention from other states (secondary parties) on one or both sides.’ These include Angola versus UNITA (with Namibia's intervention), and India versus NSCN-K (with Myanmar's intervention).

⁴⁵ For instance, Guatemala is in our dataset from 1991 through 1995, the years that it was in armed conflict.

⁴⁶ A more adequate unit of analysis would be country-rebel group, a disaggregated version of country-rebel group clusters, as is the case in the Non-state actor dataset (Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan, ‘It Takes Two’). We adopted the PRIO level classification of rebel group clusters because the ICRC rarely pinpoints the name of a particular group in conflicts involving multiple rebel groups.

⁴⁷ The PRIO dataset treats multiple groups as one opposition organization when these groups share organizational aims. We also disaggregated the groups at the level of non-state actors and analysed the data using the same specifications. The results do not change much with the disaggregation of units. The results are on file with the authors.

⁴⁸ For instance, during the years 1999, 2000 and 2001 the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaire faced two armed opposition groups: the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) and the RCD-Liberation Movement. Both groups are closely affiliated and therefore have been grouped by PRIO as corresponding to the rebels for whom Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaire was fighting 1999, 2000, 2001. However, the groups differ when it comes to their military strength. The RCD has a rebel strength measure of 3 (parity), while the RCD-Liberation Movement has a rebel strength measure of 1 (much weaker than the government it opposes). We coded 3 as the high value for this strength variable, and 1 as the low estimate.

⁴⁹ ICRC Annual Report, 1991–2006.

⁵⁰ For example, one case in which we coded ‘absence of visits’ was based on the following passage from the 1998 ICRC annual report for Tajikistan: ‘despite numerous contacts at the highest levels, access was still not granted to detainees held by the government on the grounds that the Tajik legislation allows no outside contact whatsoever for detainees under investigation’ (International Committee of the Red Cross, Annual Report, ICRC Publications).

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⁵³ For instance, the difference in means test (t-test) of rebel groups’ military strength of the missing data group and the non-missing data group is statistically significant (t = 12.02, p = 0.000), indicating that strong groups are more likely to enter into the sample in the first place. The variance comparison test (F-test) also shows that the standard deviations of military strength of missing and non-missing rebel groups are significantly different (F = 1.688, p = 0.000).

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⁵⁵ If the cases in this third category were voluminous this would pose a problem given that we want to examine how rebels decide whether to grant or deny access. However, later in our empirical analysis, we take into account the possibility of the ICRC not having contacted rebel groups to negotiate access by controlling for variables that have been identified in the literature as contributing to international organizations not being able to contact rebels, such as the presence of mountainous terrain or conflict intensity.

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⁵⁹ The original variable in the NSA dataset is an ordinal variable that is either 1 (no), 2 (does not apply), 3 (unclear), or 4 (yes), but we test with a binary variable of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, collapsing the first three categories into the ‘no’ category.

⁶⁰ Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan, ‘It Takes Two’.

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⁶² The accessibility and tractability of the warring parties is important for humanitarian operations. In many conflicts over harsh terrain, detention centres are accessible only by helicopter, making it difficult for the ICRC to carry out its mandate.

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⁶⁷ In our sample, 35 of the 103 conflicts occurred on democratic soil, democracies being defined as having a Polity score of 6 or higher.

⁶⁸ Due to the high collinearity between the foreign aid and rebel strength variables (Pearson's coefficient: 0.36, p = 0.000), we report the results separately.

⁶⁹ This result is consistent with Walter's 2006 (‘Building Reputation’) finding that governments’ reputation-building efforts increase when they face the prospect of future challengers in civil wars.

⁷⁰ This finding may seem contradictory to the finding of Valentino, Huth and Balch-Lindsay (‘Draining the Sea’) that heightened security threats make governments resort to more mass killing. We think that this divergence stems from the difference in the nature of the dependent variables. Although both studies investigate humanitarian violations, we study access to detainees and they study killing of civilians. In the case of access to detainees, military strength contributes to the organizational capacity to negotiate and gain recognition. In the case of killing civilians, militarily strong groups are likely to pose strategic threats that motivate governments to exterminate.

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⁷² We admit this is a very rough test of reciprocity. As Morrow discusses in ‘When Do States Follow the Laws of War?’, the simultaneity bias problem is present in statistical tests for reciprocity and, as he admits, the problem is difficult to tackle in a satisfying way. It is possible that ICRC access may be related to ceasefires or trust building exercises for peace agreements where both parties grant simultaneous access. To examine this possibility, we tested for a simultaneous (i.e., non-lagged) effect of reciprocity; the effect was insignificant.

⁷³ Morrow, ‘When Do States Follow the Laws of War?’

⁷⁴ This is consistent with Morrow's finding that evidence of reciprocity is weak when it comes to the treatment of prisoners of war, compared to other issues such as aerial bombardment in interstate wars.

⁷⁵ Clapham, Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors.

⁷⁶ Valentino et al., ‘Draining the Sea.’

⁷⁷ Fearon, ‘Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer than Others?’; McHugh and Bessler, Guidelines on Humanitarian Negotiations with Armed Groups.

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⁷⁹ We also ran the same models with available data only without imposing missing-as-no-visits assumption. The results are less robust than the selection model suggests, with varying degrees of statistical significance across legitimacy indicators. For instance, the ‘legal political wing’ variable receives consistently significant supports across specifications, while the ‘territorial control’ variable receives weak support and the ‘transnational support’ variable receives no support. However, we believe in the results based on our analysis of missing data rather than the analysis with only available data, because analysing only available data would mean ignoring the political process that generates missing data.

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⁸² Since the negotiations usually take a year or two, conflicts of shorter durations can generate missing visitation data. However, it is important to note that rebels who have been fighting for a long time often deny the ICRC access. FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and ELN (the National Liberation Army) are examples: they have battled the Colombian government since the 1960s, and from 1991 to 2006 only allowed the ICRC access to detainees once.

⁸³ Developing governance functions takes time and, therefore, long-standing groups are more likely than younger rebel organizations to possess these functions. However, the longevity of a rebel group and its propensity to offer its supporters services that governments usually provide are two independent processes. Consider, for example, the case of Sendero Luminoso, a significant rebel force in Peru that appears in our dataset from 1991 to 1999. Although they were certainly a long-standing group, they never granted the ICRC visitation rights. We have additional evidence comparing access behaviour of rebel organizations fighting in conflicts of short and long duration. We find that rebel groups involved in short and long conflicts do not behave very differently when it comes to their access behaviour. This evidence is on file with the authors.

⁸⁴ Spearman rank statistics show several legitimacy indicators are significantly correlated. For instance, transnational support and domestic mobilization capacity are significantly correlated with the rank statistic of 0.376.

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