Organizing Inter-Insurgent Cooperation in Multiparty Civil Conflicts
Open Access
- Author:
- Bolte, Brandon Lee
- Graduate Program:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 25, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Douglas Lemke, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
James Piazza, Major Field Member
Bumba Mukherjee, Major Field Member
Kidane Mengisteab, Outside Unit & Field Member
Michael J Nelson, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- civil conflict
rebel groups
cooperation
alliances
peace processes - Abstract:
- Over half of all civil conflicts over the past 75 years have involved multiple separate insurgent groups fighting against the government at the same time. Contemporary examples of these multiparty conflicts—including recent or ongoing wars in Syria, Burma, Sudan, India, Colombia, and elsewhere—epitomize widely-accepted claims that conflicts with multiple rebel groups tend to be longer, deadlier, and more likely to recur than conflicts between the government and just one rebel group. One of the main reasons for this is that rebel groups frequently shift their relationships with other rebels, but the extensive variation in these inter-rebel relations is not well-understood. What are the various ways that rebel groups cooperate with each other? Given variation in rebel alliance types, what are the benefits and costs of different alliances, and if some are more beneficial than others, why don’t rebel leaders always design alliances in that way? Finally, how do rebel alliances affect the peace process in multiparty civil wars? In this dissertation I unpack an under-conceptualized yet crucially important political process in multiparty civil wars: how and why rebel groups cooperate against the same government. Despite decades of international relations research on coordination problems, cooperative institutions, and alliances between states, civil war scholars largely ignore how rebel leaders design cooperative arrangements as well as the consequences of these alliances for war and peace. After contextualizing the project and defining key concepts in Chapter 1, I present a new conceptual framework for categorizing rebel alliances and their provisions as well as a new dataset of rebel cooperation in multiparty conflicts across the globe in Chapter 2. My full dataset, derived from primary rebel alliance charters and hundreds of secondary sources, encompasses 260 distinct rebel groups and over 1,700 rebel-dyad-years. In Chapter 3, I develop a game theoretic model of bargaining between rebel leaders and subcommanders to formally characterize how organizational constraints affect rebel leaders’ ability to shift warfighting strategies. In In Chapter 4, I use these data to test my new theory of intra-organizational bargaining that explains why some leaders can credibly commit to certain alliance provisions and not others. More specifically, I hypothesize (and find) that these moderately decentralized rebel organizations are more likely to commit to sharing power in an institutional alliance, whereas highly centralized and highly fragmented groups tend to cooperate in less committed ways. Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine the divergent effects of political and military rebel alliance provisions on the probability of multilateral negotiations and peace agreements in multiparty conflicts. I demonstrate that political alliances reveal information about shared bargaining spaces between rebels, leading to an increased probability of multilateral negotiations and settlements. Military alliance provisions, however, alter the costs of continued war for each party, increasing the probability of negotiations, but dramatically decreasing the chances that these negotiations are successful. I conclude with a discussion of limitations, unanswered questions, and avenues for future research. Beyond the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions of this dissertation, my analyses suggest that rebel alliances are a driving force behind how multiparty wars end and that understanding the internal politics of rebel organizations is necessary to advance a broader research agenda on “inter-rebel” relations.