Armed Groups in Disasters: Rebel Support, Natural Resources, and Rebel Survival

• In Event: Poster Session: International Political Economy II & Conflict Processes I
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Conflict Processes I

Abstract

While natural disasters in general have negative impact on human activities, the level of rebel groups’ resilience to natural disasters varies. The GAM is a militant group that sought for Aceh’s independence from Indonesia, and their fight peacefully ended by a negotiated settlement soon after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. However, the LTTE in Sri Lanka increased its violent behavior after suffering from the same disaster. Why do some rebel groups fail to sustain their organizations in the aftermath of natural disasters and either enter peace agreements with the government or end their operations, whereas other groups are resilient and continue their activities? What factors explain these two outcomes?

This study proposes that the influence of a natural disaster on the lifespan of a given civil conflict depends on the militant group’s method for extracting resources. Militant groups are hardly self-sustaining; they require access to weapons and funds, and the ways in which they obtain these resources vary across militant groups. Some groups extort local resources to establish sustainable revenue streams, whereas other groups smuggle resources, which requires more mobility and flexibility. We argue that militant groups relying on extortion are more resilient, on average, but they are more vulnerable to external disturbances compared to militant groups relying on smuggling. Establishing stable revenue streams through consistent extortion of local resources might strengthen a rebel group, but this approach makes the group vulnerable to destruction due to any unexpected events that may shut off the stream, such as a natural disaster. On the contrary, a militant group that smuggles to obtain resources tends to be relatively small in size because it depends on ad hoc resource extraction. However, that characteristic increases the group’s resilience to negative naturally-occurring events. We argue that the source of supplies is key to rebel resilience or vulnerability in the aftermath of catastrophic natural events. We thus suggest that rebels who rely on support from external patrons and diaspora communities are more resilient than other rebel groups, as their funding from these sources may be minimally disrupted by natural disasters.

We empirically test our argument using data from multiple sources. The natural disaster data are derived from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), the data on natural resource extraction by rebel groups are from the Rebel Contraband Dataset (RCD), and other rebel-related data are from the Non-State Actors in Armed Conflict Dataset (NSA). The time period of our analysis covers 1990 through 2012. The key independent variables are the severity of natural disasters, an indicator of militant groups’ resource extraction, support by external actors, and an interaction terms between those variables. We estimate the amount of time until a conflict ends (which is the dependent variable) using a Cox proportional hazards regression model.

The results largely support our hypotheses. We found that, on average, natural disasters shorten conflict durations (militant groups’ lifespans) and that rebel groups’ operations are interrupted by natural disasters, particularly when the group relies on extorting natural resources. However, the rebel groups that engage in smuggling to obtain resources are not subject to the impact of disasters because of their mobility, which enables them to seek resources outside the area where the disaster hit. We found that when a group is backed by foreign contributors, it is less likely to fail as compared to rebel groups who do not receive such external support. All other things being equal, our results show that a group with external support has a 40% lower risk of failure.

This is one of the first studies to quantitatively identify the conditional effects of natural disasters on civil conflicts, and it provides a crucial insight for scholars and policymakers, particularly for the literature on the resource curse. Numerous previous studies found that access to natural resource wealth strengthens rebel groups and helps to prolong civil conflicts. Our study shows that this effect is conditional. While some seemingly resilient rebel groups are susceptible to the negative influence of natural disasters, other seemingly vulnerable groups relying on ad hoc strategies for resource exploitation are relatively resilient in the face of natural disasters. The findings suggest that governments fighting rebel or terrorist groups should increase the efforts to track down and destroy their smuggling networks and to crush their systems of extorting local resources.

Authors

• Yasutaka Tominaga, Hosei University

• Chia-yi Lee, Nanyang Technological University