Inside the Map of Militancy: How Internal Fault Lines Fuel Armed Groups

For more than a century, geopolitics has been studied largely from the top down, as a game played by states over territory, sea lanes, and strategic corridors. A new study published in SN Social Sciences argues that this state-centric lens misses where much of today’s violence actually originates: inside states themselves. Political scientists Yayew Genet Chekol and Taye Demissie Beshi of Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia propose an internal geopolitical framework that treats non-state armed groups (NSAGs) as geopolitical actors in their own right, shaped by territorial marginalisation, governance deficits, and political exclusion. Their comparative analysis, published on 14 October 2026, traces how these three structural dimensions convert local grievances into sustained armed mobilisation across four continents.

The intellectual starting point of the paper is a critique of classical geopolitics. The authors situate their argument against a lineage running from Halford Mackinder’s 1904 ‘geographical pivot of history’ through Alfred Mahan’s theories of sea power to Rudolf Kjellén’s conception of the state as a living organism. These frameworks, they note, were built for a world of great-power rivalry. Later critical approaches, including the work of John Agnew, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Colin Flint, loosened the grip of state-centrism by showing that geopolitical discourse is constructed and contested at multiple scales. The new study extends that critical turn downward, insisting that the interactions among local, national, and transnational forces within a state’s borders are themselves a primary engine of regional instability.

At the core of the framework are three structural dimensions that the authors argue recur wherever armed groups take root. Territorial marginalisation describes the spatial concentration of disadvantage, in which peripheral regions are politically and economically disconnected from the state core. Governance deficits refer to the state’s inability to deliver security, services, and legitimate authority across its territory, leaving vacuums that armed organisations can fill. Political exclusion captures the systematic denial of representation to particular identity groups, whether ethnic, religious, or regional. The framework links these dimensions to mobilisation through political opportunity structures, the openings and constraints in the political environment that determine whether grievance translates into organised violence.

Methodologically, the study rests on qualitative desk research and a structured, focused comparison of ten cases selected to vary across group type, region, and conflict outcome. Structured, focused comparison is a technique in which the same set of questions is asked of each case, allowing systematic cross-case inference despite qualitative material. By drawing cases from Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the authors aim to show that their internal geopolitical drivers are not artefacts of any single region but recurring features of state-society relations under stress. The comparative design also allows them to examine why some conflicts terminate while others persist for decades.

The European cases illustrate how ethno-nationalist mobilisation can emerge even within wealthy democracies when territorial identity collides with centralised state authority. The paper draws on extensive scholarship on the Basque conflict in Spain, where the emergence of Basque nationalism and the armed campaign of ETA reflected a combination of linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, contested territorial identity, and perceived political exclusion. The authors also consider Northern Ireland, where the IRA’s armed struggle was embedded in long-standing structural inequalities and consociational politics, and Corsica, where nationalist politics grew from identity-based claims against the French state. In these cases, the transition from political movement to armed group depended on the perceived closure of peaceful channels of representation.

The African cases shift attention to resource geography and state capacity. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, scholarship by Michael Watts and Cyril Obi documents how oil extraction concentrated wealth in the state while imposing environmental and economic costs on local communities, producing a petro-insurgency in which armed groups claimed to fight for resource control. The paper also engages the Democratic Republic of the Congo, drawing on Jason Stearns’s account of Africa’s ‘world war’ and Séverine Autesserre’s demonstration that local rivalries over land and identity, often overlooked by international peacebuilders, drove much of the violence. Here the governance-deficit dimension is central: where the state barely penetrates its own periphery, armed groups become de facto authorities, taxing trade and administering territory.

Latin American cases highlight a different configuration, in which criminal and insurgent organisations overlap. The paper examines Colombia, drawing on Ana Arjona’s concept of ‘rebelocracy’ and Zachariah Mampilly’s work on insurgent governance, which show how armed groups such as the FARC established durable social orders in territories the state had never effectively governed. The drug economy, as analyses by Vanda Felbab-Brown and others indicate, provided both financing and a transnational supply chain that prolonged conflict. Mexico’s drug trafficking organisations, examined through work by Ioan Grillo and Congressional Research Service reporting, represent a further variant: organisations whose primary logic is economic but whose territorial control and confrontation with the state produce insurgency-like dynamics.

The Asian cases bring interstate rivalry into the internal picture. In Kashmir, the paper draws on scholarship by S. Paul Kapur, Sumit Ganguly, and recent analyses of the India-Pakistan dispute to show how a territorial conflict between states intertwines with internal political exclusion and the discursive construction of legitimacy, keeping militancy alive across generations. In the southern Philippines, work by Thomas McKenna and Zachary Abuza traces how Muslim separatism in Mindanao grew from historical marginalisation and was sustained by transnational Islamist networks. These cases demonstrate the framework’s multi-level logic: internal drivers such as exclusion and grievance interact with external intervention and regional geopolitics to perpetuate conflict long after its original causes might otherwise have faded.

Demography and resources emerge as cross-cutting variables in the analysis. The authors incorporate research on the ‘graying of the great powers’ to note that age structures shape both the supply of recruits and the fiscal capacity of states, while the resource-conflict literature, from Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler’s greed-versus-grievance debate to Michael Ross’s systematic review, informs their treatment of lootable commodities as enablers of armed organisation. They also engage newer strands of research, including studies showing that rebel groups increasingly engage in governance tasks once considered exclusively governmental, such as wartime water governance and even climate-related administration. This expanding repertoire, they argue, underscores that NSAGs are not merely spoilers but alternative providers of order, which complicates purely military responses.

The study’s policy conclusion is a call for multi-level approaches that combine security, governance, and socio-economic instruments rather than treating militancy as a problem to be defeated in the field. Because the drivers are structural, the authors argue, durable stability requires addressing territorial marginalisation through inclusive development, closing governance deficits through legitimate local institutions, and dismantling political exclusion through power-sharing and representation. The paper acknowledges the difficulty of this agenda, noting that external interventions frequently misread local dynamics, as Autesserre’s Congo research showed. Yet the comparative evidence assembled across ten cases supports the central claim: armed groups flourish where the internal geography of the state produces grievance, and they wither when that geography is redrawn through inclusion. In an era when non-state armed actors shape conflicts from the Sahel to Southeast Asia, the authors suggest that the most important geopolitical map may be the one drawn inside national borders.

Subject of Research: Internal geopolitical drivers of non-state armed group militancy

Article Title: Non-state armed groups unveiled: the internal geopolitical drivers of militancy

Article References: Non-state armed groups unveiled: the internal geopolitical drivers of militancy. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01823-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01823-9

Keywords: non-state armed groups, internal geopolitics, political exclusion, territorial marginalisation, governance deficits, armed mobilisation, conflict dynamics, rebel governance, resource conflict, ethno-nationalism, comparative case studies, regional stability