Rebel with a Cause: The Influence of Goals in Rebel Group Cooperation

• In Event: Internal and External Bargaining Among Rebel Groups

Abstract

Bargaining problems created by information scarcity and commitment problems make cooperation between rebel actors unlikely. However, alliances between rebel groups are not uncommon. Existing studies explain the ability of rebel groups to overcome these issues through the distribution of power between actors in the conflict, or through foreign sponsorship. Other research suggests that the relationship between cooperation and preferences may be more complicated than conventional wisdom would suggest. For example, Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour (2012) propose that instead of cooperating, that organizations fighting for the same ethno-national group tend to engage in violence against each other over the pool of possible recruits. This paper complements existing works by arguing goals advocated by rebel groups constrain their possible cooperation partners and that shared preferences, decrease the cost of cooperation. Through an Agent-Based Model (ABM), this paper tracks the influence of goals in forming rebel organizations. Tracking this process is important to explain why different groups with shared preferences form in a conflict and how the goals derived from these preferences are central to creating and maintaining a group. By showing the connection between goals and group formation, the ABMs demonstrate how goals can influence group behavior, especially cooperation. Further, the model demonstrates that relying on power distribution to explain rebel group formation and cooperation is insufficient as the implications of such a model do not match observable patterns in civil conflicts. The paper then uses a Bayesian Latent Variable Model and data on group goals from multiple sources to measure the position and salience of group goals in key policy dimensions which are then used to measure the distance between rebel groups in multidimensional space. This measure of goal distance is then used to predict cooperation between rebel organizations fighting in the same conflict.

Author

• Leonardo Fernandes, University of Pittsburgh