Cooperation Between Non-State Armed Actors: Conflict Issues and the Powerful Ethnic Identity

Abstract

The study explores why a non-state armed actor supports another non-state armed actor, considering that most of the previous scholarship focuses on the effect of cooperation on conflict instead of the causes. By categorizing depths of cooperation from transactional, tactical, to strategic, the study, based on data from 1975-2017, concludes that (1) ethnicity is the strongest predictor for cooperation; (2) the same conflict issues raise the likelihood of cooperation; (3) the same state enemy has a positive but statistically insignificant effect; (4) the proxy’s combat intensity improves the chance for cooperation, whereas the effect of sponsor’s combat intensity is positive but not statistically significant; (5) the same ideology is positive and statistically significant only for the model with combat intensity; (6) the effect of religion is close to zero. However, this does not mean discrediting previous studies on the influence of religion on cooperation between non-state armed actors. Besides the quantitative outcomes, a case study on the 2012 Mali War aligns with the hypothesis of strategic cooperation. The case also aligns with the hypothesis of tactical cooperation on the effect of rivals and conflict issues but is ambiguous on the effect of ideology. The case also helps find the potential effective role of ethnicity in mobilizing religious armed organizations by operationalizing ethnic grievances and governmental incompetency to undermine counterinsurgency or counterterrorism approaches without decent political resolution. Further study needs to explore how religious armed actors operationalize ethnic identity, how to make a counterinsurgency strategy with complementary political and military solutions, and how culture, languages, and norms—components of ethnicity besides social interaction and kinship—affect the alignment, defection, and fragmentation of armed groups.