Pledging Loyalty: Explaining al-Qaeda and Islamic State Franchising in Africa

Why and when do violent Islamist groups join the transnational franchises run by al-Qaeda (AQ) or Islamic State (IS)? Existing literature on the phenomenon of violent franchise networks stress the relative costs and benefits of franchising to the core organization. In this paper, we explore the question from the other side, namely, that of the franchisees. In contrast to explanations that stress the importance of capacity building or ideological alignment, we propose that franchising is driven by the dynamics of an intra-group conflict that encourages outbidding and/or splintering: established leaders join AQ or IS to forestall challengers and prevent internal schisms, while rising challengers join AQ or IS to set up their own insurgent splinter faction. We employ a mixed-methods approach that combines a statistical analysis of all violent Islamist groups in Africa in the post-2001 period with qualitative case studies of Islamist organizations that became franchisees for AQ and IS. Using data from ACLED, we estimate the effects of splinter risk on the likelihood of a group franchising. We then trace the proposed causal process through a case study of Islamist groups splintering and franchising in the western Sahel. Our results are consistent with the argument that franchising is used by insurgent leaders and commanders as a means of restraining or creating splinter factions.