Recurrent, intrastate conflict is a challenging outcome that academics and practitioners are grappling with. Scores to hundreds of variables and indicators have been applied and attributed to understanding why violence emerges, changes, and how violence and conflict terminate. However, the dynamics and unpredictability of conflict duration and termination is not widely studied or understood. Although conflict and violence are complex phenomena, can a particular mechanism that generates oscillations and sometimes chaotic and unpredictable behavior within a conflict affected state be explained?
This paper applies complexity theory and multi-species competition models to effectively understand recurrent, intrastate conflict in multiple cases across the globe. A conflict-affected state can demonstrate the following outcomes: (1) oscillations and other forms of cyclic behavior that are widely attributed to recurrent conflict; (2) coexistence; or (3) competitive exclusion in which one actor group dominates. During an intrastate conflict actors use three strategies (institutionalization, providing security, and providing economic opportunity) to claim power and defeat competing actors. However, actors are unable to defeat one another when their strategies are inefficient. Inefficient strategies lead to oscillating and unpredictable behaviors within a conflict-affected state, thus propelling that state further into conflict. When these three strategies are efficiently used violence decreases and/or becomes increasingly discriminate as other actors are outcompeted. Subsequently, oscillating and unpredictable behaviors become more uniform and predictable as the state transitions from one of conflict to one of peace.
