Unlike political parties in democratic states, armed groups in national movements lack easily measured vote shares and committee assignments. Nonetheless, the relative strength of armed groups in terms of membership size, funding, and support helps to create hierarchies of power in national movements. Although previous scholarship has often implicitly or explicitly recognized such hierarchies, systematic analysis of the hierarchy of national movements and its impact on group action is lacking. This paper will present a theory of national movement hierarchies that explains variation in the quality and quantity of groups’ use of violence, as well as how a group’s position in the movement hierarchy correlates with its likelihood of negotiating or attempting to spoil a deal with a state adversary. The theory and its competitors will be analyzed using longitudinal analysis of the Algerian and Palestinian national movements. Comparisons across movements and across groups within the same movement over time will allow for significant leverage to explain how variation in hierarchical position drives group preferences and behavior.