Rebel Alliances, Constituencies, and Civil War Outcomes

• In Event: Cooperation and Competition among Militant Groups

Abstract

What drives the outcome of civil wars? The literature emphasizes either the characteristics of both individual rebel groups and incumbents or the nature of warfare, but generally neglects the role of rebel groups’ shared constituencies and alliances. We contribute to filling this gap by leveraging a novel dataset that reports information about all rebel groups’ shared constituencies (defined on the basis of ideology and/or ethnicity) and alliances (formal and informal) in multiparty civil wars for the period 1945-2015. Our statistical analysis indicates that formal rebel alliances increase the probability of rebel victory and negotiated settlements and decrease the probability of government victory, while informal alliances only reduce the probability of government victory.

Authors

• Laia Balcells, Georgetown University

• Costantino Pischedda, University of Miami