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Recent studies indicate that British appeasement towards Hitler followed a buying-time logic, i.e., it tried to postpone confrontation until Great Britain improved its military position through rearmament. However, this chapter shows that Germany actually extended its military edge over the appeasement years. Drawing on the literature on judgment and decision-making, the chapter theorizes that competition neglect – the tendency to focus myopically on one's own capabilities and pay insufficient attention to those of the competition – may explain the puzzling gap between British policymakers' plans and actual trends in the balance of power. The competition neglect thesis and an alternative explanation, positing the occurrence of miscalculation, are tested with a case study of British foreign policy towards Germany in 1937-38.

Why do rebel groups frequently clash instead of cooperating against their shared enemy, the state? This pattern occurs in conflicts around the world, yet it flies in the face of common notions of strategic logic. Weaving together insights from international relations theory and the study of ethnic politics, Costantino Pischedda presents an original theory to unravel the puzzle of inter-rebel conflict. Examining the dynamics of civil wars in Iraq, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and Syria, Pischedda argues that infighting is a calculated response by rebel groups to perceived opportunities and vulnerabilities. Conflicts break out between groups when one sees the potential to eliminate weaker rivals at a low cost or fears the deterioration of its power relative to a competitor and embarks on a desperate gamble. Counterintuitively, Pischedda finds that rebels sharing an ethnic identity are especially prone to violent conflict, as they see each other as both potential existential threats and enticing opportunities for expansion. Since coethnic rebels aspire to control the same community, their antagonism is stark and immediate. In addition, insurgents expect to be able to draw on the resources of defeated rivals from the same ethnic group more easily than they could from those of outsiders. Marshaling a range of data, Pischedda's mixed-methods study features original interviews conducted with former insurgent leaders. The first book-length examination of inter-rebel fighting, Conflict Among Rebels sheds new light on a key question of civil war dynamics: why the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.

Abstract
Why do rebel groups often fight each other when confronting a common, and typically stronger, enemy—namely, the government? Inter-rebel aggression is a calculated response by rebel groups to opportunities for expansion and to the threats confronting such groups. In particular, inter-rebel wars occur under the following conditions: (1) when a window of opportunity emerges allowing rebel groups to defeat coethnic rivals at low costs and thus achieve rebel hegemony, or (2) when rebel groups are confronted with a window of vulnerability, in which they experience a radical deterioration of power relative to that of coethnic rivals and then attempt to escape in a desperate military gamble. Both strict military considerations and ethnic identities shape the rebel groups' calculus. Coethnicity influences the threat perception of rebel groups and their ability to grow at the expense of rivals, thus providing both defensive and offensive motives for inter-rebel aggression. Because coethnic rebel groups want to mobilize and control the same ethnic communities, they are highly sensitive to immediate, intense conflicts of interest and see other coethnic rebel groups as serious threats. Moreover, coethnic rebel groups can generally expect to absorb the resources of defeated rivals, which in turn may improve their chances in the fight against the government. In-depth case studies of multiparty insurgencies in Ethiopia's Eritrea and Tigray provinces, based on interviews with former rebel leaders, strongly support the window of opportunity and vulnerability theory of inter-rebel war.

Partition has historically been more effective than its more popular alternative power-sharing as a lasting solution to ethnic civil war. However, partition does not appear to, be a "cheap" strategy because it tends to require the deployment of robust international peacekeeping forces in order to work. In addition, international support for partition risks generating incentives for more secessionist rebellions. Thus policymakers are likely to face a difficult trade-off between the objective of putting an end to ethnic war in one place & running the risk of encouraging violence somewhere else. Adapted from the source document.