Supporting Non-state Armed Groups: A Resort to Illegality?

The prevalence of non-state violence in the world politics joined with resurfacing of states resorting to non-state armed groups (NAGs) as a foreign policy instrument warrants a more general understanding of various types of non-state armed groups such as ethnic and religious insurgencies, terrorists, guerillas, and revolutionary movements. This paper has two mail goals. One is developing a conceptual framework to allow a comparative analysis across several types of non-state armed groups. Two main attributes of these groups include 'violence' as the main 'means' to achieve their goals and pursuit of the political objectives such as secessionism, regime change, and demand for more political freedoms and rights. Second goal is developing a theoretical framework to examine the influence of internal and external circumstances on decision-making regarding the changes in a state's external security environment. I offer a cost-benefit framework to capture the main costs and benefits involved in strategies pursued to cope with external adversaries. Specifically, this paper estimates the impact of alliances, conflict history, and ethnic fragmentation on states' intentional support of non-state armed groups against the target of non-state armed group. The results of the empirical analysis yield that having allies reduces the likelihood of a state's support of NAGs. In addition, ethnic fragmentation is found to be a very strong estimator of the state support for NAGs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]