Cooperation and Competition among Militant Groups

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Scholars have long recognized the importance of cooperation and competition among militant groups in determining conflict processes and outcomes, especially related to conflict intensity and lethality, odds of rebel victory, and chances of negotiated settlements. This panel examines various facets of cooperative and competitive relations between militant groups: factors that facilitate cooperation and competition, the distinction between formal and informal alliances, the durability of alliances, and the impact of inter-group relations on war outcomes. Ilayda Onder discusses the conditions under which competition over resource mobilization leads to militant group cooperation instead of violent infighting and examines how shared constituencies and territorial presence facilitate cooperation while shared recruitment pools and territorial strongholds induce infighting using an original network database on Northeast Indian groups. Victor Asal and Justin Conrad improve our understanding of militant competition by examining the role of religious ideology in increasing the breadth and depth of potential disputes between groups using a case study of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and data on militant groups around the world. Nils Metternich examines the formation of rebel coalitions in internationalized conflicts through a multi-layer network perspective, assessing how the expected support of international actors impacts rebel coalition formation and which coalition configurations make international support for rebels more likely. Sara Harmouch, Tricia Bacon, and Elizabeth Wahlenmayer study core-periphery relations in militant group alliances and illustrate that alliance embeddedness, path dependency, and intra-affiliate relations contribute to the persistence of alliances by examining the relationship between al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the wake of the rise of the Islamic State. Finally, Laia Balcells and Costantino Pischedda examine the differing impacts of formal and informal rebel alliances on the likelihood of rebel or government victory and negotiated settlements in multiparty civil wars using a novel dataset on rebel group shared constituencies and alliances. All five papers make significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of cooperation and competition among militant actors by offering insights from novel theoretical frameworks, original datasets and a variety of empirical tools ranging from social network analysis to case studies.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Constituency and Territory: Networks of Militant Cooperation and Infighting - Ilayda Onder, Texas A&M University

• Religion and Rivalry: How Religious Ideology Fuels Militant Group Competition - Victor Asal, University at Albany, SUNY; Justin Conrad, University of Georgia

• Rebel Coalitions and Contestation in the Shadow of International Support - Nils W. Metternich, University College London; Finn Lukas Klebe, University College London

• The Loyalty of al-Qaida’s Affiliates during the Islamic State Challenge - Sara Harmouch; Tricia Bacon, American University

• Rebel Alliances, Constituencies, and Civil War Outcomes - Laia Balcells, Georgetown University; Costantino Pischedda, University of Miami

Chair

• Ilayda Onder Texas A&M University

Discussants

• Kanisha Bond Binghamton University

• Aaron M. Hoffman Simon Fraser University