Escalate or Negotiate? Constraint and Rebel Strategic Choices Towards Rivals in the Syrian Civil War

Theories of interaction among rebel groups in civil wars, like other works in the armed conflict literature, continue to see force as foundational to the trajectory and outcome of conflict. But evidence from inter-rebel conflicts in the Syrian war, which has been one of the major civil wars of our times, shows that military force is not always the preferred tool even in situations where violence is presumably cheap: in conflicts between dominant rebel groups and weaker rivals. Rather than using force, Jabhat al-Nusra, one of the strongest groups in the Syrian conflict, frequently chose to negotiate with rivals. Existing theories of inter-rebel conflict fail to explain such variation in responses. As an explanation of this puzzle of non-force, I argue that the constraint emanating from the conflict with the main enemy determines rebels’ strategies towards rivals. To investigate this argument, the paper draws on the triangulation of original data on inter-rebel conflicts in Syria, encompassing written agreements between Jabhat al-Nusra and other rebel groups, a database of important military operations in the Syrian civil war since 2011, and interviews with civil and military participants in the insurgency. The findings have important implications not only for our understanding of inter-rebel dynamics in the Syrian conflict but also for other complex civil wars concerning the relationship between inter-rebel negotiation, cooperation, success, and war duration.