C onflict between occupiers and occupied has regularly occurred over the course of history when occupiers have infringed upon a community's rights to independence and self-determination. Historically, the list of independence movements in occupied or disputed territories is long. It includes the Indian Independence Movement, the Irish Nationalist Movement, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Kashmiri separatist conflict. One common factor seen on both sides of all such conflicts is the

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... sence of leaders who act as primary motivators and decisionmakers. This article studies how differences in the nature and outcomes of conflict situations might be related to differences in the leadership element on both sides of a conflict. More specifically, this article discusses two questions. First, how is the nature of an independence movement affected by its leaders' opportunity costs and, second, how is the nature of an independence movement affected by the degree of aggressiveness shown by occupation leaders? It will be seen that the opportunity cost of independence movement leaders and the aggressiveness of the occupiers affect the nature of a self-determination movement. Other factors are concurrently important as well. They include the characteristics of the population residing in the occupied region, the nature of punishment that is being meted out to protestors, and occupiers' costs of punishing protestors. In the following section, I describe the elements of an analytical model that may be used to understand how these factors affect an independence movement.