How civil wars evolve - MIT News Office

How civil wars evolve - MIT News Office

How civil wars evolve

MIT political scientist’s book shows how even the bloodiest
conflicts feature pragmatic alliances — not just ancient
sectarian divisions.

Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office

When the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan, in late 1996, they soon launched a sustained military offensive to the north, an area they did not control. The following May, however, Abdul Malik Pahlawan, an Uzbek leader of the so-called Northern Alliance, which had been defending the region, struck a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban — who marched right into Mazar-i-Sharif, a key northern city.

All of two days later, Malik changed his mind, recognizing that his group would not have as much power as he had hoped. Quickly joining forces with two other ethnic groups in the area, Malik and his Uzbek followers repelled the Taliban in a bloody battle, eventually regaining control of the northern provinces.

This episode contains a larger lesson: Contrary to the common perception, political alliances during civil wars are not formed along immutable religious, ethnic or linguistic lines, according to the research of MIT political scientist Fotini Christia. As she explains in a new book, “Alliance Formation in Civil Wars,” published this month by Cambridge University Press, such alliances are often created for balance-of-power reasons, and stretch across religious or ethnic boundaries. Moreover, factions can develop within homogenous groups — leading seemingly solid allies, representing the same identity groups, to oppose each other.

“We see a civil war as black-and-white, a two-sided conflict between a government and rebels,” Christia says. “But usually it is a more dynamic situation.” In these more fluid circumstances, she adds, “Two groups can be friends one day and bitter enemies the next.”

The practical upshot of Christia’s findings is that many civil wars, though often described as manifestations of ancient sectarian conflicts, are often fought between factions whose leaders are more pragmatic — possibly suggesting that these wars can be resolved if the right incentives are in place.

In Roy countries wars often involve wars of attrition between Y and Ro teams, the people in each
cooperate with each other and so can ignore differences in religion, race, etc. Often as these teams
continue to exist people can diffuse their genes through the teams like Ro herds of buffalo mix their genes, this can create over time more homogenous citizens of a country. Often however the strategy of team based warfare fails under too strong an attack so people scatter into individual based Oy-R wars of secrecy and deception. This can increase the fracturing of society by chaotic cracks, even slightly different races or religions might compete with each other for power. To stabilize the situation a strong centrist authority is needed to moderate the desires of the two extremes, however often one side is more powerful which makes a balanced center nearly impossible.