"Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures"

Abstract:

Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socio-economic costs and
often persist for decades. The opacity of such forms of conflict is often an
obstacle to effective international humanitarian intervention and development
programs. To shed light on the internal organization of otherwise unknown
insurgent groups, this paper proposes two methodologies for the detection of
unobserved coalitions of militant factions in conflict areas, and studies their
main determinants. Our approach is parsimonious and based on daily geocoded
incident-level data on insurgent attacks alone. We provide applications to the
Afghan conflict during the 2004-2009 period and to Pakistan during the 2008-
2011 period, identifying systematically different coalition structures. Further
applications are discussed.