Armed Group Constellations: Cooperation, Conflict, and Order 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. Yet meaningful cooperation between armed groups is common in such wars. In 1999, five diverse factions formed the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, forcing Charles Taylor into exile in 2003. From 2004 onwards, Mogadishu’s twelve subclan courts consolidated into the Islamic Courts Union, which became the de facto government across southern and central Somalia by 2006. How do such stable relationships between armed actors emerge – and why do some endure while others collapse into violence?

This project develops a new framework for understanding cooperation, conflict, and order among armed groups in multiparty civil wars. It challenges conventional views that treat rebel alliances as purely instrumental responses to shifting power balances, and inter-rebel conflict as inevitable competition for scarce resources and territory. Instead, the project shows how repeated interactions between armed groups crystallize into structured relational patterns – constellations – that shape subsequent behaviour through embeddedness and path dependencies. These constellations enable some groups to develop informal institutions that allow relationships to survive violence, provide order in fragmented conflict environments, and create pathways toward movement consolidation.

The project’s flagship contribution is a monograph that introduces constellation theory, drawing on more than ninety interviews with Syrian rebel commanders, local governance officials, and civil society activists, and hundreds of Arabic primary documents. Building on  the in-depth analysis of the Syrian conflict, the book presents theory-testing case studies of civil wars in Ethiopia (1974-1991) and Myanmar (ongoing since 1948). 

Beyond the book, the project has generated a series of articles examining rebel governance, insurgent courts, and inter-group competition – particularly among Islamist and jihadist factions navigating both ideological differentiation and pragmatic cooperation. Together, this work illuminates how armed groups govern civilian populations, resolve disputes, compete for ideological authority, and make strategic choices about escalation versus negotiation with rivals.

The project draws on a unique evidence base combining deep case knowledge with broader comparative analysis: extensive Arabic-language fieldwork on the Syrian insurgency; original datasets on inter-rebel military cooperation, ceasefires, and peace agreements; and a data­set of all multi­party civil wars after 1945. This combination of rich qualitative insight and systematic comparison allows the project to explain not only when and why armed groups cooperate, but how such cooperation shapes civil war trajectories, wartime governance, and the political orders that emerge from conflict.

Image: A service car run by the Aleppo Sharia Committee, a joint rebel governance body, is spraying insecticide in the streets. Copyright: Regine Schwab.