"The Closest of Enemies: Alliance Formation in the Afghan and Bosnian Civil Wars"

Robert Bates, Kanchan Chandra, Roger Petersen, Monica Toft, Stephen Walt

Some of the most brutal and long-lasting civil wars of our times—Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lebanon among others—are associated with the rapid formation and disintegration of alliances among warring groups as well as fragmentation within them. The resulting multiplicity of actors has paralyzed outsiders, who have often been unable to even follow the unraveling of the conflict's complex trajectory. My dissertation attempts to enhance our understanding of civil war processes through a closer look at alliance formation. More specifically, it looks at how groups align and the variables that shape their choices.

Drawing from Afghanistan and Bosnia, my findings suggest that alliances are tactical, motivated by a concern with victory and the capture of spoils. Noting that groups rapidly and seemingly incessantly change partners, I find that no identity principles—ethnic, ideological, or otherwise—generate stable cleavages. In principle, all groups want to be in a coalition large enough to attain victory, while small enough to ensure large per capita payoffs. But in practice, this outcome proves difficult to secure. Given the multitude of players, their objectives, and their instrumental calculus, all coalitions appear to be dominated: a larger share of the spoils can be gained by joining a different alliance. The result is a process of constant defection, alliance reconfiguration, and even group fractionalization. Stability is only attained when an external arbiter can enforce cooperation.

Contrary to identity-based arguments, race, language, and religion do not appear to guarantee in any enduring way the formation of alliances. Indeed, alliance narratives prove to be a product of tactical preferences: elites of the warring parties pick their allies based on the expected utility measured in spoils and then look to their identity repertoires for characteristics shared with their allies while not shared with their foes. If a narrative can be constructed around an ascriptive characteristic, that narrative is pursued first. If no such characteristic is shared, groups look to other elements of their identity repertoire, be they of an ideological or economic nature.

My analysis relies on primary data collected over thirteen months of fieldwork including 100 interviews conducted in the respective local languages—40 in Afghanistan with leading Afghan experts, warlords, and mujahedin and 60 in Bosnia with wartime politicians, generals, and convicted war criminals. It also draws on wartime declarations; ceasefire agreements; fatwas; memoirs; local and international press; and correspondence between allies. In the case of Bosnia, it involves a range of prewar demographic data, including municipal-level ethnic intermarriage data, as well as data on prewar arms availability. In an effort to capture and present the changes in power and territorial control over the war years and their resultant effect on alliance formation, this work uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to geo-reference and digitize prewar Yugoslav municipal maps for Bosnia as well as Soviet declassified maps on the neighborhood level for the Afghan capital, Kabul, and on the province level for the whole of Afghanistan.