Rebel Coalitions and Contestation in the Shadow of International Support

• In Event: Cooperation and Competition among Militant Groups

Abstract

In current research, rebel coalition formation is modelled either conditional on behaviour of other rebel organizations or the government. This perspective focuses less on the increasing role of rebel coalitions in the context of internationalized conflicts such as Syria, Ukraine, or Yemen. We theoretically and empirically endogenize the role of international actors in rebel coalitions through a multi-layer network perspective, where the expected and observed support of international actors impacts on the probability of rebel coalition formation. Similarly, certain rebel coalition configurations make it more likely that international actors support rebel organizations against the state. Our research contributes to the understanding of rebel coalition dynamics in internationalized conflicts and provides a novel multilayer network approach to empirically model the dependencies between domestic and international actors.

Authors

• Nils W. Metternich, University College London

• Finn Lukas Klebe, University College London