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Honor Among Thieves: Understanding Cooperation Among Violent Nonstate Actors

Sat, September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott, St. Botolph

Abstract

What drives militant organizations into relationships with one another? To date, our ability to fully answer this question has been limited by the lack of systematically collected data on the full range of militant interactions. In this article, we introduce a dataset that fills this void in our understanding and we draw on it to understand the motivations behind inter-organizational interactions. Spanning 1970 to 2015, these data detail the nature of support (e.g. material, financial, technical), the level of conflict (e.g. rhetorical, physical), and the primary supplier of benefits (e.g. the patron). This work helps to contextualize existing research that finds that the connections between non-state actors strongly shape their tactical and strategic behavior.

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