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The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, why do those at the top of the power hierarchy in the pre-war period leave the rebel-controlled territories while mid-level officials are individually co-opted into the rebel political institutions? The argument is that rebels may co-opt not entire pre-existing institutions but selected individuals from these institutions, presumably mid-level officials with the experience of running the administrative affairs, into the new patronage system built by rebels. That claim will be tested against the pre-existing political and government institutions in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces dominated by the Party of Regions in the pre-war period.

AbstractThe existing literature explains the war in Donbas and the rationale for why conflict broke out there while failing to do so in other Ukrainian provinces, such as Odesa or Kharkiv. Local pro-Russian organizations could not attract considerable attention and support in the pre-war period in all parts of Ukraine, except for Crimea. The social marginalization and negligible influence of the pro-Russian organizations among the locals presumably stemmed from their weak social ties among the local population. The question is why they had such weak social embeddedness in the local societies despite relatively popular pro-Russian sympathies in these regions? Surprisingly, nobody has sought to explain the social origins of the pro-Russian movements as a source of their weakness and failure to be sparked by the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014.

The article explains why the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) became marginalised during the insurgency in Donbas despite its ideological closeness to the rebel cause. The KPU was a popular pro-rebel party during the rebellion, but sharing the rebels' ideological background doesn't automatically mean the party will profit from the insurgency to expand or retain a share of power in rebel enclaves during the rebel state-building efforts. The KPU officials welcomed the protests against the new government in Kyiv and the onset of the anti-Ukrainian insurgency under the Russian patronage in the Donbas. Still, even despite this open support, the party descended into marginalisation.

Abstract
The literature on economic statecraft, defined as the use of economic means to achieve strategic ends, deals primarily with direct state instruments (sanctions, embargoes, and loans), or delegation to state-owned enterprises. However, states as principals also frequently delegate to private enterprises, which leads to the puzzling question of why some principals delegate economic statecraft to private enterprises instead of state-owned enterprises. In the classic literature on principal–agent theory, the principal delegates to agents because of the agents' experience, the principal's poor relationship with the target subject, or inability to participate in every step of the process. Arguably, the reasons for the principal's delegation to private enterprises in economic statecraft might differ. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it introduces a three-tiered model of the economic statecraft's delegation based on deniability and control. It consists of direct state interventions, delegation to the state-owned enterprises, and delegation to the private-owned enterprises. Second, it aims to close the gap in the existing literature by focusing on the principal's preference of the delegation to private instead of state-owned enterprises in the context of Russian, Chinese, and Turkish geopolitical goals in Africa.