Some of the most brutal and long-lasting civil wars of our time those in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Lebanon, and Iraq, among others involve the rapid formation and disintegration of alliances among warring groups, as well as fractionalization within them. It would be natural to suppose that warring groups form alliances based on shared identity considerations such as Christian groups allying with Christian groups, or Muslim groups with their fellow co-religionists but this is not what we see. Two groups that identify themselves as bitter foes one day, on the basis of some identity narrative, might be allies the next day and vice versa. Nor is any group, however homogeneous, safe from internal fractionalization. Rather, looking closely at the civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia and testing against the broader universe of fifty-three cases of multiparty civil wars, Fotini Christia finds that the relative power distribution between and within various warring groups is the primary driving force behind alliance formation, alliance changes, group splits, and internal group takeovers.
Fotini Christia is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC). She received her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2008 and has been awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie fellowship and a Harvard Academy fellowship among others. Her research interests deal with issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and she has worked out of Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. Her book, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations and the Distinguished Book Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association. Her research has also appeared in Science, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Development Economics, American Political Science Review, and Journal of Comparative Politics, among other journals. Fotini Christia has written opinion pieces for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University in 2001.