On-Side fighting in civil war: The logic of mortal alignment in Syria

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl

Rationality and Society, 2020, vol. 32, issue 4, 402-460

Abstract: On-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian consequences are also grave. But it has been under-recognized empirically and therefore under-theorized by scholars to date. This article remedies the omission. Existing research can be extrapolated to produce candidate explanations, but these overlook spatial and temporal variation in on-side fighting within a war. I provide a theory that accounts for this ebb and flow. On-side fighting hinges on belligerents’ trade-offs between short-term survival and long-term political objectives. Enemy threats to survival underpin on-side cooperation; in their absence, belligerents can pursue political gains against on-side competitors. I evaluate this threat-absence theory using evidence from the ongoing Syrian Civil War’s first years. Fine-grained fatalities data capture fluctuating enemy threats to on-side groups’ survival and situate on-side fighting and its absence. Findings support threat-absence theory and contribute to research on warfighting and political competition in civil wars and to the study of coalition dynamics in other settings, including elections and legislatures.

Keywords: Alignments; alliances; civil war; coalition dynamics; on-side fighting; political violence; Syria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ratsoc:v:32:y:2020:i:4:p:402-460

DOI: 10.1177/1043463120966989

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