TY - JOUR
T1 - Intrinsic Social Incentives in State and Non-State Armed Groups
AU - Gilligan, Michael J.
AU - Khadka, Prabin
AU - Samii, Cyrus
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Binod Paudel, Fabrice Gouzo, and Kamaran Mohammed for invaluable research assistance. We thank New York University and the Folke Bernadotte Academy, Sweden, for its generous financial support of this research. The views expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Government of Sweden. We are grateful for the helpful comments we received from Eli Berman, Ruth Ditlmann, Aila Matanock, Betsy Paluck, Bilal Siddiqi, Jacob Shapiro, and Austin Wright, as well as seminar participants from the American Political Science Association, Empirical Studies of Conflict, Folke Bernadotte Security Sector Reform Working Group, Juan March-Carlos III, London School of Economics, Northeast Workshop in Empirical Political Science, Social Sciences Center Berlin, University of California-Berkeley, and University of Pittsburgh.
Funding Information:
This research was funded by The Folke Bernadotte Academy, Grant Number 012-10-01192-3.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association.
PY - 2023/2/20
Y1 - 2023/2/20
N2 - How do non-state armed groups (NSAGs) survive and even thrive in situations where state armed groups (SAGs) collapse, despite the former's often greater material adversity? We argue that, optimizing under their different constraints, SAGs invest more in technical military training and NSAGs invest more in enhancing soldiers' intrinsic payoffs from serving their group. Therefore, willingness to contribute to the group should be more positively correlated with years of service in NSAGs than in SAGs. We confirm this hypothesis with lab-in-the-field and qualitative evidence from SAG and NSAG soldiers in Nepal, Ivory Coast, and Kurdistan. Each field study addresses specific inferential weaknesses in the others. Assembled together, these cases reduce concerns about external validity or replicability. Our findings reveal how the basis of NSAG cohesion differs from that of SAGs, with implications for strategies to counter NSAG mobilization.
AB - How do non-state armed groups (NSAGs) survive and even thrive in situations where state armed groups (SAGs) collapse, despite the former's often greater material adversity? We argue that, optimizing under their different constraints, SAGs invest more in technical military training and NSAGs invest more in enhancing soldiers' intrinsic payoffs from serving their group. Therefore, willingness to contribute to the group should be more positively correlated with years of service in NSAGs than in SAGs. We confirm this hypothesis with lab-in-the-field and qualitative evidence from SAG and NSAG soldiers in Nepal, Ivory Coast, and Kurdistan. Each field study addresses specific inferential weaknesses in the others. Assembled together, these cases reduce concerns about external validity or replicability. Our findings reveal how the basis of NSAG cohesion differs from that of SAGs, with implications for strategies to counter NSAG mobilization.
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U2 - 10.1017/S000305542200020X
DO - 10.1017/S000305542200020X
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85129087446
SN - 0003-0554
VL - 117
SP - 22
EP - 41
JO - American Political Science Review
JF - American Political Science Review
IS - 1
ER -