Living to Fight Each Other another Day: Armed Group Relationships in Multiparty Civil Wars

Multiparty civil wars are often portrayed as zones of anarchy, where numerous actors with different loyalties and goals battle each other in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Bloody civil wars in the Demo­cratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yemen come to mind here. In line with this dominant under­standing of internal dynamics of civil wars, rebel infighting has received heightened attention in the last years. However, most of the existing expla­nations tend to over-predict violent conflict, while leaving crucial temporal, spatial, and actor-related factors unex­plained. Further­more, infighting, like fragmen­tation, has mostly been studied in relation to co-ethnic groups, leaving it open how insights from this literature travel to groups that mobilize on an ideo­logical basis. Finally, the larger relation­ships between groups that predate specific interactions and shape which characte­ristics violent conflict takes are usually not considered in this literature. 

On the other hand, scholars in the coope­rative camp use very thin conceptua­lizations of alliances that are limited to the military realm. This overlooks that armed groups also frequently establish institutions outside of this domain, such as governance bodies, umbrella organizations, or simply make agree­ments in order to manage daily affairs.

Finally, with few exceptions, an integrated approach explai­ning the linkages between and variations of both inter-rebel conflict and coope­ration is so far missing. It is no coinci­dence that most contri­butions are limited to one of the two phenomena, rather than trying to incor­porate them in a larger model that explains both. In this way, unpleasant conceptual questions, such as factors that might explain both infighting and cooperation (like shared identity) are circumvented.

Living to Fight Each Other another Day challenges existing takes on both inter-rebel cooperation and conflict through a deep within-case analysis of the Syrian civil war and comparative evidence from multiparty civil wars worldwide and across historical periods. Combining a theory-building with a theory-testing approach, the project and the accom­panying book manuscript explain how groups manage to cooperate to varying degrees and what this coope­ration looks like. The manuscript also accounts for why some relation­ships form in some civil wars and not in others; and why some relation­ships endure, while others end after a short time. Above all, the book explains why some armed groups manage to cooperate to an impressive degree, while other relation­ships break down after only a short time.

The book manuscript which is based on the project leader’s PhD thesis introduces a new typology of armed group relation­ships in multi­party civil wars, and traces the emergence, stabilization and eventual break­down or trans­formation of three ideal types of armed group relation­ships in multiparty civil wars: alignment, coalition, and partnership. Each type is characte­rized by different patterns of inter­action (cooperation, conflict, and conflict manage­ment) between armed groups. The nature of inter-rebel violence also varies across types. It is structured and limited by the degree of institutio­nalization of cooperation, creating orders that aim to constrain counter­productive violence.

To support the argument, the book draws on a range of evidence which combines deep insights into one case with an analysis of broader patterns: around 90 interviews in Arabic with partici­pants in the Syrian insurgency; thousands of primary docu­ments; data on inter-rebel cease­fire and peace agree­ments; a database of military operations in the Syrian civil war since 2011; and structured compari­sons between armed group relation­ships in civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Iraq, and Myanmar.