For decades, the sovereign state served as the main actor in conflict studies. Lately, in light of the changing landscape of the international arena, political scientists have been paying increasing attention to the question of agency and, more specifically, to the role of nonstate actors, including militant ones, in global affairs. (See, for example; Jacob N. Shapiro’s The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations, 2013; Paul Staniland’s Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, 2014; and Aila Matanock’s Electing Peace: From Civil Conflict to Political Participation. 2017.) Studying nonstate actors poses both theoretical and methodological challenges. Indeed, recent contributions to the understanding of asymmetrical conflicts, insurgencies, and terrorism feature innovative theories and methods that are less relevant for studying states. However, analyses that bring together both state and nonstate actors and explore the interactions among them are still sparse (Daniel Byman’s Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism, 2005, is among the few systematic academic studies of such ties).
In States in Disguise, Belgin San-Akca successfully tackles this complex topic and makes significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the international relations literature. At the heart of this remarkable book is a comprehensive theory that explains the international and domestic conditions that motivate states to support rebel groups, as well as the circumstances in which rebels ask states for their support.
Chapter 1 consists of a short introduction, in which the author underscores the importance of the topic and offers snippet previews of the theory and methods, as well as a user-friendly road map for the book. In Chapter 2, “A Selection Theory of State Support for Rebel Groups,” San-Akca presents alternative (and sometimes competing) frameworks for explaining the selection processes of allies. Most notably, she draws insights from both the realist and constructivist approaches. She further elaborates on the possible circumstances under which sovereign states, on the one hand, and rebel groups, on the other hand, are likely to forge alliances. The author successfully synthesizes the different ideas into a set of testable hypotheses.
Chapter 3, “Dangerous Companions: Research Design, Data Collection, and Coding Procedures,” makes a remarkable contribution and should serve as an object lesson for graduate students in international relations. The chapter offers a clear, step-by-step account of the study’s methodological and empirical foundations. I found the forthright description of the dilemmas, difficulties, and solutions refreshing and convincing. The most important parts of this chapter are the sections that explain 1) the decision to choose the “triad-year” (states, groups, and targets) as the unit of analysis, 2) the subsequent decision to create a new database suitable for testing the main arguments of the book, and 3) the operationalization of the variables. I can only imagine the amount of time and effort that went into gathering data about 455 rebel groups that operated between 1945 and 2010, let alone matching the data with corresponding information about other actors.
San-Akca chose the scientifically appropriate path. Many scholars seize opportunities to skip the data collection stage and to use existing databases for testing their hypotheses. Not too long ago, a major obstacle for studying conflicts involving nonstate actors was the poor quality of data. However, the renewed scholarly interest in such conflicts, and the unceasing developments in the field of data science, yielded numerous publicly accessible databases. These databases adhere to the most rigorous academic standards and are only a few clicks away. Thus, it is tempting to identify a database and then to formulate questions and hypotheses that would fit it. The simpler path is to find proxy variables and use them to test the hypotheses. Nonetheless, dodging the data collection phase and relying on information that others have gathered, cleaned, and tested have proven to be problematic. San-Akca wisely avoids such easy yet potentially misleading approaches in this study. I applaud the author for her transparency and commitment to meticulously detailing every step of the research. It is possible that some readers will find the book technical. However, the author sets important standards of scientific rigor for researchers who seek to transform theory-driven quantitative studies into books.
In Chapters 4 and 5, entitled “States’ Selection Model” and “Rebel’s Selection Model,” respectively, the author proceeds to the heart of the study. Both chapters open with a brief discussion of an illustrative case study—the Palestinian in Chapter 4 and the Chadian in Chapter 5. What follows in both chapters is a careful quantitative analysis. The structure of the chapters follows an academic article format. However, books provide their authors with opportunities to elude the structural constraints that journals impose. A less formal structure would have allowed San-Akca to avoid repetition and to offer a narrative that could engage a broader readership. However, this is a question of individual preferences, and I can understand the rationale of the book’s structure.
Chapter 6 offers additional analysis, a revisiting of the theory, and some policy recommendations. San-Akca concludes that shared ideologies, ethnicities, and religious beliefs draw states and groups to one another. Moreover, groups are likely to reach out to potential supporters when their independent capabilities diminish. States, on the other hand, are likely to offer support when facing conjoining internal and external threats.
The book offers more than a hundred pages of appendices. The most important information in them, namely, a snippet from the database and the full codebook, could have been even more useful if the appendices had appeared online, rather than in print, along with the maps, figures, and tables. An accompanying Website with dynamic capabilities to explore the data could have offered scholars the opportunity to replicate the analysis, as well as to follow San-Akca’s important recommendations for building on this seminal work.
To conclude, the significance of States in Disguise exceeds its immediate scope. In fact, the book demonstrates the pressing need to remove barriers between the research of international and of domestic politics. Much like other core topics in political science, including globalization, mass immigration, and transnational movements, violent conflict no longer fits into dichotomous categories. As the Syrian civil war demonstrates, civil wars can spill over to other countries and draw in the involvement of international state and nonstate actors. In the book, San-Akca provides solid foundations for a research agenda that would bridge the gap in the study of conflicts between the often mutually exclusive lenses of international relations and comparative politics.
