Programmatic Incompatibility: Ideology, Trust and the Limits of Rebel Cooperation Among Syria’s Kurdish Actors

This article examines how ideology shapes alliance trajectories in multi-party civil wars, focusing on the Syrian Kurdish PYD and KNC. Challenging materialist explanations, I show that programmatic incompatibility and mutually exclusive designs for political order, creates an intractable commitment problem that overrides structural pressures to cooperate. Drawing on rebel leaders’ interviews and document analysis, this research shows how ideology produced conflicting approaches to governance, alliances and threat perceptions, hindering cooperation between rebels. By specifying the causal mechanisms through which programmatic conflict produces systematic rule-breaking in formal pacts, the article provides a new framework for understanding alliance failure in civil wars.