Introduction

In the southern Philippines, maritime smuggling to Malaysia and abduction of tourists at home continues mar the 70 year conflict between the government and Moro insurgents. On the Arabian Peninsula, blockade runners deliver supplies to Houthi rebels in Yemen. The 68 year conflict between Israel and Palestine too is marked by maritime operations. In 2002, Israel seized 50 tons of weapons aboard the MV Karine A and continues to face attacks by Hezbollah’s combat divers. These insurgencies are three of the five longest since the end of the Cold War. A superficial examination may lead to conflicting conclusions about the impact of maritime operations on conflict duration. Maritime terrorism and piracy might focus the regime or external actors on dismantling a group or spur diaspora funding. Maritime smuggling could be a lifeblood for material starved groups, or lead groups from their core grievances toward criminality. However, only one of the five shortest civil wars since the Cold War conducted maritime operations. Understanding the role of maritime operations in insurgency will help decision makers and security forces resolve these enduring conflicts.
Just as geographical location influences relative fighting capability,\cite{buhaug_geography_2009} rebel groups with proximity to the water have unique opportunities: piracy, maritime terrorism, and maritime smuggling. Maritime smuggling provides insurgencies access to a large variety of arms with greater control than non-maritime insurgencies. In the Phillippines, Abu Sayyaf relied on maritime logistics to sustain their three month uprising to control of the city of Marawi.\cite{_islamist_2017} Rather than choking off the insurgency with maritime interdiction or port closures, the Army fought insurgents they could see in the city. This article presents evidence leaders should think differently. Water access matters.
Outside of piracy, the existing literature on maritime insurgency is descriptive in nature and fails to explain why insurgent groups take to sea. In this paper, I argue the mechanism of maritime smuggling contributes to insurgency duration. I define maritime insurgency as a coordinated campaign by insurgents to influence their land campaign through smuggling, piracy, or maritime terrorism. With new data on insurgent maritime activities and geolocation data, I test four hypotheses at the dyad level with a duration model. I then contrast the cases of the maritime Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka and the Naga insurgency in northeast India to determine the plausibility of my argument and find that maritime smuggling was crucial to the LTTE’s ability to sustain a long active insurgency. To my knowledge, this article provides the first quantitative study of insurgent maritime activities.
The quantitative and qualitative analysis that follows finds insurgent maritime operations to predict insurgency duration. My duration model estimates maritime insurgencies as 80.7% less likely to end on a given day than an equivalent insurgency that does not use the water. Likewise, my plausibility probe demonstrates how maritime access can influence divergent growth between two groups with similar initial allocations. In addition, I find democracy is associated with increased civil war duration and defense spending is associated with decreased duration.
This paper proceeds as follows. Section \ref{section:lit} sets maritime insurgency in relation to modern theories of civil war. Section \ref{sect:theory} develops a theory of maritime insurgency that proposes insurgent maritime smuggling as a mechanism critical to their resilience. In Section \ref{sect:quant}, I analyze the duration of the 104 insurgencies since the end of the Cold War. Section \ref{sect:qual} probes the plausibility of maritime logistics as the mechanism by contrasting the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka with the India’s Naga insurgency. I compare these insurgencies because their origin conditions are broadly similar, but they differ on maritime access. I conclude in Section \ref{sect:conc} with the implications of this research for the academic community and policymakers.