Internal Politics and Inter-Rebel Alliance Agreements in Multiparty Civil Wars

• In Event: Internal and External Bargaining Among Rebel Groups

Abstract

Despite the tactical benefits of joining forces against a common enemy, cooperation among rebel organizations in multiparty civil wars is often difficult to achieve. Allied rebels gain from shared resources and coordination against the state, leading to a higher chance of victory, but tactical or ideological disagreements, credible commitment problems, and disputes over the distribution of postwar power between leaders often hinder rebel unity and lead to pessimistic ex ante expectations about the durability of a potential alliance. Given the prospects for strategic betrayal between insurgent groups, why do some groups cooperate and form sustainable alliances, while others do not? More fundamentally, inter-rebel cooperation ranges from temporary information sharing or joint training exercises to forging unified military commands and joint political institutions for coordination, political decision-making, and post-war governance. Among cooperative arrangements that do emerge, what explains this extensive variation in their degree and form?

Previous research has recognized the severe credible commitment problems faced by rebel organizations in multiparty civil conflicts. This work has demonstrated that ethnic or ideological homophily, relative power considerations, and shared foreign sponsorship all affect the propensity of rebel groups to forge alliances with one another. These explanations, however, suffer from two major shortcomings. First, the literature emphasizes external political forces that push or pull groups together but ignore the fact that internal bargaining dynamics within individual rebel groups also affect their propensity for cooperation. Second, existing empirical analyses of rebel alliances often assume that all forms of cooperation are the same or only distinguish between “informal” coordination and alliances with formal names.

I propose an extended framework for understanding inter-insurgent relations that incorporates both the credible commitment problems between groups and the principal-agent problems within them. Rebel leaders are expected to deliver upon promises of success to the rank-and-file and lower-level commanders who may have different preferences over short-term and long-term political gains. Rebel leaders, for instance, make decisions to maximize their prospects for post-war power, whereas rebel soldiers may be primarily motivated by short-term material gains or purposive benefits. This divergence in internal interests, often leading to poor internal control by the leadership over the rank-and-file, may make the enforcement of cooperative agreements with other groups difficult, since collaborators expect the terms of an agreement to be met even at the expense of organizational autonomy. Thus, although insurgent alliances are fundamentally agreements between rebel leaders, these leaders have organizational constraints that limit the features of an alliance that the leaders will ultimately agree upon.

To study these rebel cooperative arrangements, I have drawn upon hundreds of news sources, academic articles and books, and the content of actual formal texts of rebel alliance agreements to collect a new time-varying dataset of inter-insurgent relations in multiparty civil conflicts between 1975 and 2016. Rather than limiting my analysis to rebel cooperation writ-large, I distinguish between informal, formal, and institutionalized alliances and categorize agreements by whether they are political, military, or both. Informal alliances include instances of resource-sharing, joint operations, and trade, but exclude any formal, public declarations that establish mutual expectations for future cooperation. Formal alliances include a public declaration or agreement by both sides to cooperate, and may include a unified bargaining front and joint political platform, a promise to coordinate military activities, or both. Institutional alliances include the formation of joint political institutions or bureaucracies, joint military command institutions, or both. These novel data, as well as the compilation of available formal and institutional rebel alliance agreement texts, are uniquely suited for studying the dynamics of inter-insurgent relations during civil war. Using a variety of measures of relative power, foreign sponsorship, and shared-identity, I show that previous explanations for alliance formation do not uniformly explain the onset of different types of rebel alliances. Moreover, I demonstrate that internal organizational structures such as command-and-control mechanisms as well as the geography of violence for each insurgent group has a significant effect on the tendency of rebels to create more formalized military alliance agreements. The contributions of this research represent a crucial step forward in developing an understanding of inter-insurgent relations, which is important for designing peace-building strategies in countries experiencing multiparty civil wars.

Author

• Brandon Lee Bolte, Pennsylvania State University