A network approach to rebel fighting durations in civil wars

Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that competitive dynamics dominate strategic behavior between rebel organizations, but these can be offset by incentives to free-ride in cases where the underlying incompatibility displays public good characteristics. Based on a network game theoretic model, we derive a statistical framework that allows for a direct test of strategic interdependence. We find that the estimated duration interdependence is positive, that is weaker in secessionist conflicts, and that modeling this interdependence explicitly outweighs existing empirical measures of interdependence (e.g. number of organizations). Finally, we demonstrate that the model fit of rebel organizations' fighting durations can be improved by taking strategic interdependence into account.