Coordination, Competition, and Learning in Multi-Actor Conflict

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Research over the last decade has provided many new insights into the inner workings of multi-actor conflict. We thus know that coordination and competition within and between groups can impact the duration and severity of conflict with potentially devastating consequences for civilians and their livelihoods. However, our understanding of the drivers behind varying conflict dynamics in multi-actor conflict settings is still very limited and cooperation and competition in research to date is often tied to structural factors such as groups’ power, their ideology, or ethnicity. This panel looks beyond the structural factors that underpin conflict dynamics with five papers that make significant empirical and theoretical contributions with the aim to improve the prediction, analysis, and resolution of protracted conflicts in our world today. The first paper focuses on the spread of tactics in multi-actor settings, challenging the conventional wisdom of ideological diffusion by looking at the nature of relations and processes of socialisation. The second paper investigates how groups’ levels of coordination change with context, showing evidence for more formal relations, across group types (e.g. relations between unions and student groups) and tactical boundaries (e.g. relations between nonviolent and violent groups) in more repressive environments. The third paper zooms in on the micro-level drivers of inter-group competition by leveraging novel fine-grained data on groups’ resource bases in the Afghan conflict. The fourth paper examines the prospects of ethnic minorities in multi-actor conflict, focusing on transnational support networks that might overcome barriers of mobilisation for these groups. The last paper proposes a more nuanced approach to the analysis of cooperation and competition over time, introducing new data that shows groups to often change from being friends to foes, and back. The panellists introduce and leverage several novel datasets and methodological tools ranging from social network analysis to case studies with data sources comprising archival data, social media posts, newswire data, military documents. The five papers will be discussed by two leading scholars, guiding an important discussion for the field of conflict studies and beyond.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Inter Group Learning, Emulation, and Diffusion in Militant Alliance Networks - Ilayda Onder, Texas A&M University

• Accomplice or Spoiler? Examining (In)formal Relations in Multi-Actor Conflict - Finn Lukas Klebe, University College London

• Micro-Level Determinants of Inter-Militant Competition: Taliban-ISKP War - Christopher William Blair, Princeton University

• Impact of Transnational Support on Minority-Led Resistance Movements - Margherita Belgioioso; Ches Thurber, Northern Illinois University

• It's Complicated: Explaining Frenemy Relationships in Civil Wars - Shahryar Minhas, Michigan State University; Arica N Schuett, Emory University; Willa Jeffers, Emory University; Emily K. Gade, Emory University

Chair

• Finn Lukas Klebe University College London

Discussants

• Mai Omer Hassan MIT

• Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham University of Maryland, College Park