Frenemies: Why Rival Insurgents Work Together

Carlo Jose Vicente Caro

Security, Middle East

From Syria to Colombia, no bedfellow is too strange.

A problem in the literature of the relationships between nonstate armed groups is that cooperation and competition among them are usually treated as distinct phenomena that follow different logics. Studies usually offer separate explanations of why cooperation or competition occur in particular cases, and there are hardly any theoretical frameworks (apart from BJ Phillips’) that can explain why both cooperation and competition would occur between two nonstate armed groups.

Most studies separate and focus on either competition or cooperation—such as Hanne Fjelde and Desirée Nilsson, Navin Bapat and Kanisha D. Bond, Ely Karmon, Assaf Moghadam, or Fotini Christia—while ignoring the overlap between them.

As a result, huge questions remain concerning the behavior of nonstate armed groups and their interactions. Moreover, if the purpose of scholarly research is to develop competent counterterrorist and insurgency policies, then ignoring the other side of the coin in considering groups’ behavior will undoubtedly result in failed policies.

My research tries to understand that intriguing yet common phenomenon of “coopetition.” Indeed, scholars have ignored that groups can simultaneously collaborate and compete. If this phenomenon exists, it means that cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive, and that they may have the same causal mechanism and logic. I have borrowed the term coopetition from organizational theory to describe the phenomenon in the behavior of nonstate armed groups.