Indirect Governance at War: Delegation and Orchestration in Rebel Support

• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211027311
• Author: Tim Heinkelmann-Wild,Marius Mehrl
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 66(1) 115 –143

Indirect Governance at

War: Delegation and

Orchestration in

Rebel Support

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild

1

, and Marius Mehrl

1

Abstract

Instead of attacking their adversaries directly, states often do so indirectly by sup-

porting rebel groups. While these support relationships vary considerably, existing

research lacks a comprehensive account thereof. To explain states’ choice of sup-

port, we suggest differentiating between two modes of support relationships

according to the control opportunities they offer states over rebels: while delega-

tion enables “hands-on” control, “hands-off” orchestration allows for plausible

deniability and does not harm rebels’ local legitimacy. We argue that sponsors prefer

orchestration when “hands-on” control can be substituted by goal alignment or

competition; and they prefer delegation when the conflict is highly salient. Tests

using global data for the period 1975-2009 support the first two expectations.

Surprisingly, states’ capabilities also render “hands-off” orchestration more likely.

The paper advances the understanding of external rebel support by transferring

insights from indirect governance theory to the study of indirect wars and putting it

to statistical test.

Keywords

proxy warfare, rebel support, principal-agent theory, orchestration, delegation,

indirect governance, governor’s dilemma.

1

GeschwisterScholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversityMunich, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Tim Heinkelmann-Wild, Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University

Munich, Oettingenstr. 67, Munich 80538, Germany.

Email: tim.heinkelmann-wild@gsi.lmu.de; tim.heinkelmann-wild@gsi.uni-muenchen.de

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116 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(1)

Introduction

Rather than attacking other states directly,governments often rely on indirect warfare

by supportinga rebel group’s fight againstan adversarial government (Salehyan 2010,

494).

1

Take as examples the Russian government’s support for the separatists in

Eastern Ukrainianagainst their central government (Rauta 2016) as well as the United

States (US) government’s sponsorship of Kurdish rebels inter alia against the Assad

government in Syria (Byman 2013, 906-7; Cragin 2015). Indeed, while direct war

between states has become rare, the fight between factions within states has been the

dominant typeof conflict since 1945 (Melander,Pettersson, and Themn´er 2016), with

roughly half of rebelgroups receiving external support by foreign governments (D. E.

Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2013, 527; San-Akca 2017).

Research therefore increasingly focuses on indirect warfare (Byman 2005, 2013;

San-Akca 2009; Bapat 2012; Belgioiso 2018; Sawyer, Cunningham, and Reed 2017;

Karl´en 2017; Tamm 2016; Petrova 2019; Kriegand Rickli 2019). A growing strand of

this research draws on Principal Agent (PA) Theory and conceptualizes indirect war-

fare as “textbook example” (Hovil and Werker 2005, 25) of delegation, whereby

“external actors play an important role in shaping the insurgency and exert control

over it” (Salehyan 2010, 501; cf. Byman and Kreps 2010; Salehyan, Gleditsch, and

Cunningham 2011; Salehyan, Siroky, and Wood2014; Salehyan 2010; Szekely 2016;

Popovic 2017; Rauta2016). In a PA logic, sponsors should generally aim to supervise

rebels’ fulfilment of delegated tasks as strictlyas possible to avoid agency slack.States

are thus expectedto “delegate to rebels [ ...] when they can effectively monitor agent

activities and sanction bad behaviour” (Salehyan, Gleditsch, and Cunningham 2011,

711). The lack of such “hands-on” control is then explained by a sponsor’s incap-

ability to provide effective supervision and generally conceived as “weak and

problematic” (Byman and Kreps 2010, 9; cf. Salehyan 2010, 505).

While this scholarship has advanced our understanding of indirect warfare con-

siderably, it cannot fully account for the empirical variety of indirect warfare. In line

with its expectations, we indeed observe instances where states closely control

sponsored rebels. They thereby rely on “hands-on” control instruments such as the

employment of troops on the ground to train the rebels or monitor their compliance,

as well as the provision of sanctuaries on their own territory which allows for

sanctioning rebels in case of non-compliance. For instance, the US retained a high

degree of control through providing Syrian rebels with training and deploying mil-

itary personnel on the ground (Byman 2013, 996). However, we also observe numer-

ous instances where highly capable states refrained from using such “hands-on”

control instruments. For example, Russia—a great power far from being militarily

incapable—provided the rebels in East Ukraine with armaments without applying

hierarchical controls (Rauta 2016, 97) and the US similarly mainly relied on finan-

cial aid to assist the Contras in Nicaragua (Hoekstra 2021). The question is thus:

Why do state sponsors sometimes opt for “hands-on” controls when supporting rebel

groups and refrain from them at other times?

2Journal of Conflict Resolution XX(X)