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Alliances between Militant Groups

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

Abstract

Instrumentally, militant groups should seek to maximize their power against governments by forming alliances. However, studies in bargaining theory predict that alliances between militants would suffer from commitment problems. This study seeks to identify the conditions under which militant groups overcome these acute commitment problems and form alliances. Two game theory models of alliances amongst militants are presented, the first capturing bilateral co-operation, and the second under conditions of asymmetry. It may be concluded that while militants less susceptible to government repression should prefer bilateral alliances, vulnerable militants are more likely to form asymmetric alliances involving state sponsors. Following the theoretical predictions, the theory is tested empirically using the UCDP/PRIO data.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (email: bapat@unc.edu); and The University of Maryland – College Park (email: kanisha@umd.edu), respectively. The authors are sincerely grateful to Kristian Gleditsch, Mark Crescenzi, Sarah Croco, Stephen Gent, Errol Henderson, Doug Lemke, Will Moore, Glenn Palmer, Todd Sandler, the Journal's four anonymous reviewers, and especially George Rabinowitz, for their exceptionally helpful comments. Data replication materials are available at http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/bond/.

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18 We acknowledge that this model greatly simplifies these conflicts. It is possible that in some cases there are either more than two groups or more than one state involved. It is also possible that in a particular case one of the factions may be a splinter group, or that the groups may co-operate under an umbrella organization. However, to allow the models to develop clear empirical implications, we simplify the model to three players, and assume that each group is distinct from one another.

19 The game assumes complete but imperfect information. Each player's utilities are represented by Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions.

20 To allow for generalizability, we assume that the concession may substantively represent the granting of territory to the group, the altering of an offensive government policy, investment in the militant group's home area, cash or any other policy concession the group is seeking.

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35 We currently lack a reliable measure of the ideological compatibility of the militant groups. While one strategy might be to examine the manifestos of some of these groups, we encounter two potential problems. First, not all of the groups have public manifestos. Secondly, in forming an alliance, these groups might have incentives to misrepresent their true ideologies in order to make themselves more attractive alliance partners, or to signal that the alliance is stronger than it actually might be. While this is certainly an interesting area of study, we leave it for future research and focus on what we can currently test.

36 Particularly for the ethnically or religiously based conflicts, individual actors could not be identified, but it was clear that there was more than one challenger – examples of the Uppsala/PRIO coding of this are: Sikh insurgents, Palestinian factions or sectarian factions. If there was evidence of some co-operation/co-ordination among these actors, then the entire collective was coded as having formed an alliance. We do not create dyads that allow groups that are fighting separate territorial conflicts to be considered alliance partners. For example, in the case of India, we have dyadic pairings for those groups that participated in the conflict in Kashmir and pairings for groups involved in Naxalite insurgency. However, we do not create dyads that consider the groups in the Kashmir conflict as potential alliance partners with the Naxalites.

37 The eighteen observations that involved major powers as target states were removed from the analysis, though the results are robust even when they remain in the dataset. However, since the major powers’ campaigns involved interventions on foreign territory (United Kingdom–People's Republic of Yemen; France–Algeria; and Soviet Union–Latvia), it is inappropriate to consider these observations to be comparable to cases where the target government was fighting multiple groups within its own territory. The exclusion of the major power observations removed 1.04 per cent of the observations.

38 The full dataset for replicating the analysis is available at: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/bond/.

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59 The results do not change if we use the first weak-link indicator as opposed to the second with the controls.

60 As a further robustness check, we re-analysed the models using all of the controls from Fearon and Laitin's 2003 study, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’. The results remain consistent and the weak-link variable along with the interaction term remain in the anticipated directions and significant.

61 The 95 per cent confidence intervals are in the parentheses.

62 Byman et al., Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements.