Book Project

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. However, we also see a lot of meaningful cooperation between armed groups in many civil wars. For instance, in 1999, five diverse groups formed the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), which forced Charles Taylor into exile in 2003. From 2004 onwards, Mogadishu’s twelve subclan courts gradually consolidated into one organizational body, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which expanded its influence to become the de facto government in southern and central Somalia by 2006. So, how did stable relationships between armed actors emerge after all?

Living to Fight Each Other Another Day challenges conventional views on armed group alliances and infighting in multiparty civil wars. It introduces a more general understanding of armed group relationships that may exist for groups using a range of organizational forms and structures, with varying ideologies and conflict goals, and operating in a range of civil wars. In a nutshell, the argument is that armed groups form various types of relationships that are a function of geographic scope and content of cooperation: alignment, coexistence, coalition, and partnership. In this way, the book explains under which conditions the diverse groups involved in these complex wars can cooperate, why and how various types of cooperative relationships between armed actors emerge, and what impact cooperation and its breakdown have on the course of the war. The book then conducts an in-depth empirical analysis of the Syrian civil war to substantiate the argument. It also further tests the argument using structured case studies of armed group cooperation and conflict across the globe and in different periods. 

The book draws on a range of evidence that combines deep insights into one case with an analysis of broader patterns: nearly 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 a dataset of all multiparty civil wars after 1945 compiled by the author.

Feel free to contact me for the book proposal and sample chapters.