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Abstract
What explains the variation in the strategies of consolidation among armed groups? We examine three conditions that can explain the modes of militant consolidation – territorial control, organizational structure, and external support. We test these theoretical conjectures using unique time series data on armed group consolidation in Afghanistan from 1989 to 2001. Using a linear probability model, we find that territorial control, organizational structure, and fungible forms of external support have the most significant impact on explaining consolidation. This article contributes to the study of armed group dynamics by drawing on existing theory and leveraging original data to explain variation in strategies of militant consolidation.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Emily Gade, Thomas Johnson, Sarah Dreier, Marcella Morris, Ava Sharifi, Chonlawit Sirikupt, and participants of the COALA research group at University College London for their valuable feedback on data collection and earlier drafts of this article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, “Actor Fragmentation and Civil War Bargaining: How Internal Divisions Generate Civil Conflict,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 3 (2013): 659–72.
2 Kristin M. Bakke, Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, and Lee J. M. Seymour, “A Plague of Initials: Fragmentation, Cohesion, and Infighting in Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 2 (2012): 265–83; Caitriona Dowd, “Actor Proliferation and the Fragmentation of Violent Groups in Conflict,” Research & Politics 2, no. 4 (2015): 1–7.
3 Cunningham, “Actor Fragmentation and Civil War Bargaining.”
4 Emily Kalah Gade, Mohammed M. Hafez, and Michael Gabbay, “Fratricide in Rebel Movements: A Network Analysis of Syrian Militant Infighting,” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 3 (2019): 321–35.
5 Lee J. M. Seymour, Kristin M. Bakke, and Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, “E Pluribus Unum, Ex Uno Plures: Competition, Violence and Fragmentation in Ethnopolitical Movements,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 1 (2016): 3–18.
6 Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Kristin M. Bakke, and Lee J. M. Seymour, “Shirts Today, Skins Tomorrow: Dual Contests and the Effects of Fragmentation in Self-Determination Disputes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 1 (2012): 67–93.
7 Mohammed Hafez, Michael Gabbay, and Emily Gade, “Consolidation of Nonstate Armed Actors in Fragmented Conflicts: Introducing an Emerging Research Program,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (forthcoming). For the purposes of this article, we focus on the group level of analysis unlike the article introducing this special issue by Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade, which focuses on the movement level of analysis. We also recognize that dyadic relations influence two groups’ propensity to consolidate. However, because this is one of the first empirical studies of armed group consolidation, we seek to observe the trends at the group level first before understanding how these dynamics may play out relationally.
8 Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Case Study Method, ed. Martyn Hammersley, Peter Foster, and Roger Gomm (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), 118–64. We take Afghanistan to be a most-likely case for consolidation, as expressed by Eckstein. We expect this case to confirm our predictions if in fact our theoretical priors hold true. If instead the case does not confirm our predictions, our theory may be invalidated and so we must cast strong doubt on our propositions.
9 Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade, “Consolidation of Nonstate Armed Actors in Fragmented Conflicts.” Note that this definition is restricted to mergers rather than including alliances as does Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade.
10 Luis de la Calle and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, “Rebels without a Territory: An Analysis of Nonterritorial Conflicts in the World, 1970—1997,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 4 (2012): 583–603.
11 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
12 Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade, “Consolidation of Nonstate Armed Actors in Fragmented Conflicts.” In the introduction article to this special issue, Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade provide a more detailed discussion of territorial control.
13 Abdulkader H. Sinno, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
14 Sarah E. Parkinson and Sherry Zaks, “Militant and Rebel Organization(s),” Comparative Politics 50, no. 2 (2018): 271–90.
15 Sinno, Organizations at War.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Elizabeth Kier, “Homosexuals in the US Military: Open Integration and Combat Effectiveness,” International Security 23, no. 2 (1998): 5–39.
19 David A. Lake, “Anarchy, Hierarchy, and the Variety of International Relations,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 1–33.
20 Idean Salehyan, “The Delegation of War to Rebel Organizations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 3 (2010): 493–515.
21 Navin A. Bapat and Kaniasha D. Bond, “Alliances between Militant Groups,” British Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 793–824.
22 Hafez, Gabbay, and Gade, “Consolidation of Nonstate Armed Actors in Fragmented Conflicts.”
23 Katherine Sawyer, Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, and William Reed, “The Role of External Support in Civil War Termination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 61, no. 6 (2017): 1174–202; Daniel Byman, “Outside Support for Insurgent Movements,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 36, no. 12 (2013): 981–1004.
24 Idean Salehyan, “No Shelter Here: Rebel Sanctuaries and International Conflict,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 54–66.
25 Byman, “Outside Support for Insurgent Movements.”
26 Jason Seawright and John Gerring, “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 297.
27 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
28 The Pashtun movement includes the Taliban, Hizb-i-Islami (Hekmatyar), Hizb-i-Islami (Khalis), Ittihad-i-Islami, and Mahaz-i-Milli. Note that references to Hizb-i-Islami refer to the Hekmatyar faction.
29 The Hazara movement includes Hizb-i-Wahdat and Hizb-i-Wahdat (Akbari).
30 The Uzbek movement includes Junbish-i-Milli and Junbish-i-Milli (Malik).
31 The Tajik movement includes Jamiat-i-Islami. Shura-e Nazr operated primarily as the military faction of Jamiat-i-Islami and therefore is not classified as an independent group.
32 Chris Sands and Fazelminallah Qazizai, Night Letters: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Afghan Islamists Who Changed the World (London: C. Hurst & Publishers, 2019), 380.
33 David E. Cunningham, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Idean Salehyan, “It Takes Two: A Dyadic Analysis of Civil War Duration and Outcome,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 4 (2009): 570–97; Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 39, no. 5 (2002): 615–37.
34 Fotini Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
35 Minorities at Risk Project [MAR Project], “Minorities at Risk Dataset,” Center for International Development and Conflict Management, 2009.
36 Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi, eds., The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
37 Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars.
38 Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset;” MAR Project.
39 Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars.
40 Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset;” MAR Project, “Minorities at Risk Dataset.”
41 MAR Project, “Minorities at Risk Dataset.”
42 Gleditsch et al., “Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset;” Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan, “It Takes Two: A Dyadic Analysis of Civil War Duration and Outcome;” Belgin San-Akca, States in Disguise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Although the groups we include is not an exhaustive list, our sampling protocol generated a list of all the major players in the duration of the conflict and is consistent with other major conflict datasets including Gleditsch et al.’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) dataset, Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan’s Nonstate Actor (NSA) dataset, and San-Akca’s Nonstate Armed Group (NAG) dataset. To determine which groups to include, we started by collecting dyadic data for all actors, from large organizations to warlord militias, where we captured which dyads experienced consolidation. We then derived an adjacency matrix and degree measures from the dyadic dataset to account for the number of consolidation interactions each group had throughout the conflict. From the adjacency matrix and degree measures we identified the ten groups that engaged in the most interactions throughout the conflict, also including splinters derived from the top ten groups.
43 Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Marianne Dahl, and Anne Frugé, “Strategies of Resistance: Diversification and Diffusion,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 3 (2017): 591–605. Consistent with literature on resistance movements such as from Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé, we understand a movement as a campaign of collective mobilization that may involve a combination of strategies from conventional politics, violence tactics, and nonviolent tactics in pursuit of political goals.
44 Accounting for mergers and splinters, the resulting group level dataset includes 11 groups with a total of 93 observations.
45 The summary of variable sources and operationalization can be found in Table A1 and A2 in the Appendix.
46 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
47 Kate Cronin-Furman and Milli Lake, “Ethics Abroad: Fieldwork in Fragile and Violent Contexts,” PS, Political Science & Politics 51, no. 3 (2018): 607–14.
48 Sinno, Organizations at War; Cunningham et al., “It Takes Two.”
49 Ibid.
50 Belgin San Akca, “Supporting Non-State Armed Groups: A Resort to Illegality?” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 4 (2009): 589–613.
51 San Akca, States in Disguise.
52 Peter Krause, Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017). Dowd, “Actor Proliferation and the Fragmentation of Violent Groups in Conflict.”
53 Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars.
54 Megan A. Stewart, “Civil War as State-Making: Strategic Governance in Civil War,” International Organization 72, no. 1 (2018): 205–26. For example, this methodological strategy has been used by Stewart. To demonstrate that our results are not a product of the linear probability estimator, we additionally estimate a logistic regression. These results are seen in Table A4 in the Appendix as marginal effects.
55 Figures for all models can be seen in Figure A1 and Figure A2 in the Appendix.
56 Rashid, Taliban.
57 Rashid, Taliban; Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars.
58 Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars.
59 Sands and Qazizai, Night Letters, 380.
60 Sinno, Organizations at War.
61 Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978–1992 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999).
62 Abdulkader Sinno, “Explaining the Taliban’s Ability to Mobilize the Pashtuns,” in The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan, ed. Robert D. Crews and Amin Tarzi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 59–89.
63 Sinno, Organizations at War.
64 Steven T. Zech and Michael Gabbay, “Social Network Analysis in the Study of Terrorism and Insurgency: From Organization to Politics.” International Studies Review 18, no. 2 (2016): 214–43.
65 Bakke, et al., “A Plague of Initials.”
66 Cunningham, et al., “Shirts Today, Skins Tomorrow.”
67 Peter Rudloff and Michael G. Findley, “The downstream effects of combatant fragmentation on civil war recurrences,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 1 (2016): 19–32.
68 David Zucchino, “Collapse and Conquest: The Taliban Strategy That Seized Afghanistan,” New York Times, 18 August 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/asia/taliban-victory-strategy-afghanistan.html.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid. Quoting Saad Mohseni, chief executive of Moby Media Group. Moby Media Group oversees TOLO News, the leading independent news network in Afghanistan.
71 Ibid.
72 “Mapping the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” BBC News, 16 August 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-57933979.