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Foreign governments frequently intervene in armed conflicts by sponsoring rebels against their adversaries. A sponsorship is less costly than a direct military intervention, but rebels often defy orders, desert fighting, or turn guns against their sponsors. Under what conditions do rebels defect against their sponsors? Drawing on organizational the...
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... These studies usually look at the relationship between rebel groups and sponsors adopting a principalagent framework and empirically they analyze intentional support cases when studying the motivations of support and the effects of external support on conflict processes. See Byman & Kreps (2010), Bapat (2012), Salehyan (2010), Salehyan et al. (2014), Popovic (2017) and Meier et al. (2023). 5. See for instance, Huang (2016), suggesting that diplomatic rebels are more likely to receive support and in return more external support increases the reputation of rebels both domestically and internationally since increased material capabilities also enable rebel governance activities for constituents of rebels (another threat for target states) and international community might regard the diplomatic rebels as credible and legitimate partners. ...
How do target states react to third-party sponsorship of rebel groups? In this article, we provide a typology of responses from target states based on their severity and comprehensiveness level. We argue that the external support level and existing strategic interaction between targets and sponsors are crucial to explain the variation in target responses toward state sponsors since they affect the target states’ level of perceived threat. We test our theoretical claims using an original dataset featuring target responses between 1991 and 2010. Our findings show that strategic rivalry is the most crucial factor in increasing the severity and comprehensiveness of responses. Higher levels of support for rebel groups increase only coercive responses and do not impact comprehensiveness, whereas formal alliances decrease the adoption of mixed responses. Our study contributes to the literature on the external support of rebels and conflict management with implications for predicting target states’ responses to sponsorship.
... Armed groups' institutionalization is shaped by the factors mentioned previously. When these researchers argue that armed groups' resources, networking structures (both pre-and in-war), foreign support, and material gains affect their organizational cohesion (Staniland, 2014), internal discipline (Weinstein, 2007), and divisions and splits (Popovic, 2015(Popovic, , 2017, they suggest that these independent variables shape armed groups' institutional strength. On the other hand, the dependent variables analyzed in organizational studies, such as armed groups' behavior at war and use of violence, are affected by armed groups' institutionalization (Hoover Green, 2016. ...
Institutionalizing Violence offers a detailed focus on the two most influential Egyptian jihadi groups—al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya and Islamic Jihad. From the killing of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 to their partial association with al-Qaeda in the 1990s, the two groups illustrate the range of choices that jihadis make overtime including creating political parties. Jerome Drevon argues that these groups’ comparative trajectories show that jihadis embracing the same ideology can make very different strategic decisions in similar environments. Drevon’s analysis of these groups’ histories over the past four decades illustrates the evolution of jihadism in Egypt and beyond. Institutionalizing Violence develops an institutional approach to radicalization to compare the two Egyptian groups’ trajectories based on ethnographic field research and hundreds of interviews with jihadi leaders and militants in Egypt. Drevon provides a unique perspective on how jihadi groups make and implement new strategic decisions in changing environments, as well as the evolution of their approaches to violence and non-violence.
... Karlén (2017) demonstrates that the presence of external support during a civil war increases the risk of conflict recurrence in the short term. Popovic (2017) examines the causes of rebel defection against their sponsors and finds that decentralized groups are less accountable to foreign patrons. We also now know that differences in the provision of external support are associated with the adoption of violent/nonviolent tactics (Petrova 2019), the likelihood of civil war negotiations (Karlén 2020), that gender framing impacts rebel efforts to secure support (Manekin and Wood 2020), and that foreign sponsorship affects groups' incentives to engage in rebel governance (Huang and Sullivan 2021). ...
... In the last decade, principal-agent theory has almost completely dominated theorizing on conflict delegation (Byman and Kreps 2010;Salehyan 2010;Salehyan, Gleditsch, and Cunningham 2011;Salehyan, Siroky, and Wood 2014;Popovic 2017). Even scholars using alternative labels, such as beneficiary-proxy (Mumford 2013) or sponsor-insurgent (Tamm 2016a), adhere to many of its core assumptions. ...
... that is, separate principals providing support to the same agent, has received attention in the literature on conflict delegation. Tamm (2016b) has looked at how multiple principals affect rebel cohesion and splintering, while Popovic (2018) has explored how this impacts inter-rebel alliances. Although other forms of delegation patterns have been less systematically explored, alternative arrangements are visible in empirical cases. ...
This forum provides an outlet for an assessment of research on the delegation of war to non-state armed groups in civil wars. Given the significant growth of studies concerned with this phenomenon over the last decade, this forum critically engages with the present state of the field. First, we canvass some of the most important theoretical developments to demonstrate the heterogeneity of the debate. Second, we expand on the theme of complexity and investigate its multiple facets as a window into pushing the debate forward. Third, we draw the contours of a future research agenda by highlighting some contemporary problems, puzzles, and challenges to empirical data collection. In essence, we seek to connect two main literatures that have been talking past each other: external support in civil wars and proxy warfare. The forum bridges this gap at a critical juncture in this new and emerging scholarship by offering space for scholarly dialogue across conceptual labels.
... 24 Milos Popovic finds that rebel forces without a centralized organizational structure are more difficult to control than centralized ones. 25 He also finds that foreign sponsorship increases the chances of alliance formation between different rebel groups. 26 Ryan Grauer and Dominic Tierney argue that the overall likelihood of rebel forces receiving foreign support has increased over time. ...
Drawing the dividing line between civil and interstate war can be a difficult task. This task is made even more difficult by a gap in the current typology of armed conflict. The conflict studies literature in general and the coding rules of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in particular acknowledge that internal conflict can involve external actors but ignore that interstate conflict can be disguised as internal rebellion. This creates an unnecessary risk of categorization errors and a risk of neglecting the potential complexity of interstate conflict in the modern world. This article uses Idean Salehyan's distinction between intervention and delegation, the Nicaragua Judgement of the International Court of Justice, and the debate on the causes of the war in eastern Ukraine to illustrate this point. On the basis of this discussion, it proposes the introduction of a new category – delegated interstate conflict – to create a more coherent and symmetrical typology.
... By introducing foreign sponsorship into the study of inter-rebel dynamics, I expand current theoretical insights with the focus on how different configurations of sponsors can influence cooperation among rebel groups. This approach contributes to an emerging work on state sponsorship of rebel groups (Salehyan 2009;Salehyan et al. 2011Salehyan et al. , 2014Popovic 2015aPopovic , 2015bSzekely 2016) as well as to the rich scholarship on interstate rivalry (e.g. Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2005;Colaresi 2005; Maoz and San-Akca 2012) by linking incentives of external states to the actual use of rebel groups to shape and shove civil war dynamics. ...
... In conflict studies, this usually translates into a government providing money, sanctuary, weapons or other tangible resources to rebel groups in return for their cooperation over goals, organization and tactics (Byman and Kreps 2010;Salehyan 2010;Salehyan et al. 2011Salehyan et al. , 2014Szekely 2016). The threat to withdraw support allows the sponsor to deter disobedience or pressure problematic rebel groups into submission (Popovic 2015a;Salehyan 2010). If this logic holds, then the principal could also induce its agent to cooperate with other agents. ...
From the Patriotic Front struggle against the minority rule in Rhodesia to the seven-party mujaheddin alliance in Afghanistan, inter-rebel alliances make the armed opposition more resilient and successful in the face of government repression. Why then do some rebel groups cooperate with each other while others do not? Drawing on the principal-agent theory, I argue that the presence of foreign sponsors is likely to encourage alliance formation in civil wars especially when two rebel outfits share a state sponsor. Shared sponsors may demand cooperation between their agents and credibly threaten to punish them for non-compliance. They may also insist on the establishment of umbrella institutions to improve their monitoring and sanctioning capacity, and to increase the legitimacy of their agents. I test this argument using the UCDP Actor dataset with new data on alliances between rebel groups. I find strong evidence that shared sponsors increase the probability of inter-rebel alliance.
... Interventions on behalf of the opposition have a particularly deleterious impact, as they can provoke government repression against groups from which the armed rebels draw their recruits (Weinstein, 2006;Kuperman, 2008). These interventions sometimes encourage predation on the rebel side as well (Byman & Kreps, 2010;Salehyan, Siroky, & Wood, 2014;Popovic, 2015aPopovic, , 2015b. South African support for the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone is an oft-cited example of how externally backed armed opposition groups can turn into a perpetrator of mass atrocities. ...
In their seminal study “Resort to Arms,” Small and Singer (1982) defined a civil war as “any armed conflict that involves (a) military action internal to the metropole, (b) the active participation of the national government, and (c) effective resistance by both sides.” Internationalized civil wars constitute a newer classification, denoting a conflict involving organized violence on two or more sides within a sovereign state, in which foreign elements play a role in instigating, prolonging, or exacerbating the struggle. Small and Singer defined civil war as one in which a “system member” intervenes into a substate conflict involving organized violence. Although Singer and Small conceived “system members” narrowly as external sovereign states engaged in military intervention into the civil war in question, the definition has since been expanded by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to include other foreign actors—such as nonstate or private actors, diasporas, IOs, corporations, or cross-border kin groups—any of which can intervene to intensify a domestic civil conflict. From superpower interventions during the Cold War to more recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, internationalized civil wars have garnered increasing scholarly attention, primarily because they tend to be far bloodier and more protracted than noninternationalized civil wars.
How to end such wars is a problem long bedeviling the international community. Civil wars are already more difficult to end than interstate wars partly because there are more players to satisfy in civil war settings, with multiple conflict parties coexisting on a single territory, and multiple factions within each conflict party—each constituting a “veto player” that might plausibly spoil a peace agreement should the agreement not satisfy their needs. This problem is exacerbated by an order of magnitude when a civil war becomes internationalized. When outside actors get involved in a civil war, the number of veto players rises correspondingly to include not only domestic players and internal factions, but also the involved external players, which may include foreign governments, diaspora groups, foreign fighters, and/or transnational social networks.
Managing or ending internationalized civil wars is thus a highly complicated balancing act requiring attention not just to internal, but also to external veto players represented by all involved parties both inside and outside the conflict state. The traditional methods of conflict management involve electoral engineering, power-sharing arrangements, or other peace deals that seek to satisfy the aspirations of involved internal parties, while ensuring that the peace deal is “self-enforcing.” This means that it will hold up even in the absence of outside pressure. In internationalized civil wars, however, conflict managers must also satisfy involved outside actors or otherwise neutralize external conflict processes. There are multiple methods for doing this, ranging from effective border control in cases of conflict spillover to decomposing internationalized conflicts into civil and international conflicts, which are solved separately, to outright peace enforcement involving international security guarantees.
Why do states provide different forms of support to rebels fighting in foreign civil wars? How can external support band disparate rebels together in some conflicts but lead to bloody fratricide in others? My thesis aims to answer these questions. To do so, I make a two-step argument. First, I argue that civil wars are opportunities for states to improve their place in the global balance of power, and they provide different forms of support depending on the risk of retaliation from other states. Second, I argue that different forms of support have heterogeneous effects on rebel dynamics. The influx of money and weapons–which are fungible and exchangeable–induces a competitive conflict environment and leads to greater splintering and rebel infighting as groups compete over important resources. Nonfungible support such as troops shifts the balance of power, alleviates the systemic effects of anarchy, causes bandwagoning among and within rebel groups, and leads to more allying and less splintering. This argument provides the first holistic account of how the international system shapes cooperation and competition in rebellions. I test the empirical grounding of the argument as part of a mixed-method nested research design. First, I conduct two large-N analyses: a temporal network analysis to explain how external states support rebels and a matching analysis of rebel group behaviour on how different forms of support affect the propensity that rebels fight, form alliances, and splinter. Second, I conduct a theory-testing case study of the conflict in Northern Ireland (1968-1998) and a cross-case comparative study of Libya (2011-2019) and Syria (2011-2019). Drawing on archival evidence, secondary and grey literature, and micro-level conflict data, I demonstrate the causal mechanisms underpinning the results of the large-N analyses. I find support for key parts of the argument.
Does the overtness of external support to rebels affect civilian targeting in civil wars? Conflict studies increasingly scrutinize how insurgent sponsorships shape rebels’ behavior. However, the influence of external sponsors’ decisions to publicly acknowledge or deny their support on rebel conduct is largely neglected. This article introduces a new dataset on the overtness of external support to rebels in civil wars between 1989 and 2018. It then assesses whether the overtness of support is correlated with insurgents’ propensity to target civilians. I hypothesize that overtly supported rebels are less likely to target civilians than covertly supported rebels. This hypothesis stems from how supply-side factors—the way state sponsors expectedly act after having allocated their support—impact insurgents’ structure of incentives around relations with non-combatants. Statistical analyses yield strong support for my hypothesis. Moreover, further analyses show that support overtness influences civilian targeting independently from sponsors’ characteristics, such as political regimes or foreign aid reliance. Thus, in addition to the type of material aid insurgents receive, variation in whether support is covert or overt shapes how rebels treat civilians.
