Understanding Insurgent Rivalry

This chapter examines the factors that make organizations more likely to be rivals of one another. Given the relatively sparse nature of rivalry connections among insurgent organizations, network-based models of rivalry cannot be used for the analysis. The chapter thus reports descriptive data to examine these rivalries and uses logistic regressions of group-year data to determine what factors are related to insurgent organization rivalry. It appears that ideology is a key characteristic driving rivalry. Religious and separatist groups are likely to have rivals, but the type of ideology most likely to lead to rivalry is the combination of religious and ethnoseparatist. Involvement in the drug trade and territorial control are also associated with the likelihood of rivalry. At the country level, perhaps surprisingly, democracy is negatively related to rivalry formation.