Supporting Non-State Armed Groups: A Resort to Illegality?

Abstract

States have suffered equally, if not more, from violence generated by Non-state Armed Groups (NAGs), such as ethnic and religious insurgencies and terrorists, than violence directly generated by their counterparts. This does not undermine the fact that states occasionally provide support to these groups in the form of safe havens, weapons, and funding. This paper argues that state support is a function of the states' vulnerability in extracting and mobilizing resources to secure their borders. In contrast to the conception that weak or failed states provide the largest pool of resources to NAGs, the relatively strong states still prevail as their most fervent supporters. The preliminary evidence also suggests that NAGs serve as substitutes for allies.

Rivalry and State Support of Non-State Armed Groups (NAGs), 1946-20011

“…A binary variable that assumes a value of 1 if the potential supporter and the NAG share religious, ethnic, or ideological affinity and zero otherwise (San‐Akca 2009a). We use this variable as an instrument of support for NAG in the instrumental variable analysis of target response.…”

“…We start by discussing the state–NAG cooperation data set (San‐Akca 2009a). The groups included in the data are derived from the UCDP/PRIO armed conflict data set (Gleditsch et al.…”

“…20 20 Chi‐Square (1) = 4.148, p < .05; Yule’s Q = −0.634 ( N = 4,560). The only case of support by a democracy to a NAG targeting its target (another democracy) was the support by Greece to the PKK targeting Turkey between 1989 and 1992 (see San‐Akca 2009a). …”

Does natural gas fuel civil war? Rethinking energy security, international relations, and fossil-fuel conflict

“…One recent exception is the work of Aydın [53], who examines the influence of liberal ideology on intervention abroad by focusing on US foreign policy. The oft-cited political motives include, but are not limited to, utilizing armed groups as proxies to settle longstanding issues with rivals, containing the conflict to prevent civil war contagion and the spread of instability in the international arena, helping trans-border ethnic kin, and offering humanitarian aid [12,14,17,[54][55][56].…”

“…Since data on the key independent variables are available only for the period between 1980 and 2010, the empirical analyses are limited to this period. A NAG can be an ethnic or religious insurgency, a terrorist group, or a group of rebels who pursue some political objective(s) through violent means [55]. We use the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset to determine the population of internal conflict cases [77,78].…”