Moe Gyo is a writer and consultant working with ethnic organizations in Myanmar. Writing from the Thai–Myanmar borderlands, he draws on years of direct engagement with communities shaped by conflict and disrupted health systems. His work captures firsthand how resilience and informal support networks develop under prolonged irregular warfare. His writing has appeared in Insight Myanmar and the Journal of Special Operations Medicine, among others.
From Governance Competition to Market Structure
Part I established insurgency as a form of strategic competition over governance rather than a contest of destruction. It showed how armed actors endure, expand, or fail based on their ability to provide security, justice, public goods, and legitimacy more credibly than their rivals, and how civilians, operating under coercion and uncertainty, allocate compliance within a contested governance marketplace. Viewed through this lens, violence functions not as an end in itself, but as a mechanism for shaping incentives and enforcing authority within a broader competitive system.
Yet understanding insurgency as a marketplace explains why conflict persists without explaining how its structure constrains strategic choice. Governance competition does not occur on a blank slate. It is shaped by enduring structural forces that determine how easily new challengers emerge, how intensely rivals compete, how much leverage civilians possess, how dependent actors are on external suppliers, and what alternative sources of order cap any single authority’s control. These forces shape outcomes independently of leadership quality, ideology, or battlefield performance.
To analyze these structural constraints, Part II applies Porter’s Five Forces framework to the war marketplace. While originally developed to explain competition in commercial industries, the framework is well suited to irregular conflict because it focuses not on individual actors but on the competitive environment in which they operate. Transposed to insurgency, “profitability” corresponds to authority, compliance, and durability; “market share” to civilian control; and “entry barriers” to the costs of establishing and enforcing governance.
By mapping rivalry, entry, substitution, and bargaining power onto governance competition, this section shows why some insurgencies regenerate endlessly, why others fragment into warlordism, and why certain conflicts resist decisive resolution regardless of military effort. Part I defined insurgency as competitive governance. Part II explains why the structure of that competition so often favors instability and what must change for durable authority to emerge.
Among the structural pressures shaping governance provision, rivalry between existing providers is the force through which all others are expressed. Barriers to entry, civilian bargaining power, external suppliers, and available substitutes condition the competitive environment, but it is rivalry that translates these forces into lived political order. Civilians experience rivalry through overlapping taxation, competing courts, contested security provision, and the calibrated use of violence and restraint by rival authorities.
A five-forces framework applied to irregular conflict, illustrating how entry barriers, civilian leverage, supplier inputs, substitute authorities, and rivalry intensity shape governance competition and predict conflict outcomes. Infographic generated by The Resistance Hub.
Force 1: Threat of New Entrants
When Governance Markets Are Contestable
The threat of new entrants captures how easy it is for armed groups to form, survive, and scale. In war, “entry” means the ability of an insurgent organization to establish itself as a credible alternative authority.
Borderlands, urban slums, refugee camps, and marginalized rural zones function as low-barrier incubators where groups can:
- Recruit cheaply
- Experiment with governance
- Build parallel revenue streams
- Avoid early repression
Proposition 1: The lower the effectiveness of state governance, the lower the barriers to insurgent entry and the higher the probability of insurgent emergence.
Force 2: Bargaining Power of Buyers (Civilians)
Who Civilians Can Say “No” To
In the war marketplace, civilians are the primary buyers of governance. Their bargaining power determines whether armed actors must compete or can simply coerce.
Proposition 2: High civilian bargaining power incentivizes cooperative governance; low bargaining power produces coercion-heavy control models.
Force 3: Bargaining Power of Suppliers
Who Enables Insurgency
Suppliers are the inputs that make insurgency viable:
- Fighters and administrators
- Weapons and explosives
- Financing and logistics
- Safe havens and transit routes
- External sponsors
- Ideological legitimacy producers
Proposition 3: Autonomous supplier networks are a primary determinant of insurgent durability and resistance to military defeat.
Force 4: Threat of Substitute Governance Providers
Who Else Can Govern
Insurgents do not compete only with the state. They compete with substitutes:
- Tribal or clan systems
- Religious authorities
- Local militias
- Criminal protection rackets
- NGOs and humanitarian actors
- International peacekeepers
- Private security providers
Proposition 4: Effective substitute governance providers reduce insurgent appeal and increase fragmentation of authority.
Force 5: Rivalry Among Existing Competitors
How Many Guns Are in the Market
Rivalry measures the intensity of competition among armed actors.
Proposition 5: Higher rivalry degrades governance capacity; lower rivalry enables institutionalization and durability.
Synthesis: Reading the War Environment Structurally
Taken together, the Five Forces define the structural environment in which war is fought. They do not describe individual actors or tactical choices; they explain the conditions that shape who can enter the conflict, how authority is exercised, how long organizations endure, and how control fragments or consolidates over time.
- Entry barriers determine who can credibly contest authority.
- Buyer (civilian) power determines how governance is exercised.
- Supplier power determines organizational endurance.
- Substitutes determine the ceiling on authority any actor can claim.
- Rivalry determines the coherence, discipline, and violence of competition.
Different configurations of these forces produce recurring and predictable outcomes:
- High entry barriers + high civilian bargaining power → monopoly restoration and state dominance
- Low entry barriers + strong suppliers → protracted insurgency and regeneration
- High rivalry + weak substitutes → fragmentation and warlordism
- Low rivalry + weak incumbent authority → insurgent takeover
What appears as strategic failure or success at the tactical level is often the product of these structural conditions rather than leadership quality or battlefield performance. Reading the war environment structurally, therefore, becomes a prerequisite for strategy rather than an academic exercise.
Conclusion: Structure as the Hidden Determinant of Strategic Outcomes
Insurgency endures not because states lack military power, but because they fail to dominate the governance marketplace in which authority is contested. Wars are not decided solely by killing enemy fighters or clearing terrain; they are decided by patterns of civilian compliance over time. As Part I argued, insurgency is best understood as a competitive process in which states and armed challengers vie to supply security, justice, public goods, and legitimacy under conditions of institutional breakdown and coercion. Part II has shown that the outcomes of this competition are not arbitrary. They are structured.
Applying Porter’s Five Forces to the war marketplace clarifies why similar counterinsurgency efforts produce radically different results across cases. Low barriers to entry explain insurgent regeneration and fragmentation; civilian bargaining power disciplines governance behavior and sustains hedging; supplier networks determine organizational endurance; substitute institutions cap authority and dilute monopoly control; and rivalry among governance providers translates these pressures into everyday patterns of violence, restraint, and compliance. Together, these forces shape the competitive environment within which all strategic choices are made.
Seen in this light, many persistent puzzles of irregular warfare become intelligible. Militarily weaker insurgents outlast stronger states not because they fight better, but because the structure of the governance market favors challengers. Governance reforms fail not because civilians reject them, but because competitive conditions render them non-credible. Violence succeeds or backfires depending not on its intensity, but on how it alters rivalry, entry barriers, and civilian bargaining power. What appears chaotic at the tactical level reflects predictable equilibria at the structural level.
Most importantly, this analysis clarifies a critical distinction: structure shapes what strategies are viable, but it does not determine how actors respond. The Five Forces define the competitive environment, but they do not dictate behavior. States and insurgents are strategic actors who attempt, often imperfectly, to manipulate these forces in their favor: raising or lowering barriers to entry, altering civilian leverage, securing or severing suppliers, eliminating substitutes, and managing rivalry. Some succeed temporarily; many fail systematically.
Understanding war structurally is therefore not an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for strategy. Without diagnosing the underlying market forces, interventions mistake symptoms for causes and tactics for solutions. With that diagnosis in hand, strategy becomes intelligible as an effort to reshape competition rather than simply win battles.
Part III—Strategy in the War Marketplace turns from structure to action. It examines how states and insurgents pursue strategy within the war marketplace, how they attempt to manipulate the same five forces from opposing positions, and why asymmetries in constraint and leverage produce recurring patterns of success and failure. If Parts I and II explain what insurgency is and why it persists, Part III explains how it is fought and why so many efforts to defeat it collapse under their own strategic misreading.
The foundational fieldcraft manuals that shaped unconventional warfare doctrine, remastered for clarity and accessibility. Essential context for understanding how non-state actors organize, operate, and sustain irregular campaigns.
View on Amazon →The foundational text that introduced the Five Forces framework used throughout this article. Porter’s analysis of competitive structure translates directly to the governance marketplace explored in this series.
View on Amazon →A comparative examination of how states and insurgent organizations compete for legitimacy and control under conditions of protracted political violence.
View on Amazon →A foundational study of the structural conditions — relative deprivation, institutional failure, and governance gaps — that produce insurgent emergence, directly relevant to the entry barriers analysis in this article.
View on Amazon →Editorial Note:
This article is a reader-submitted contribution. The Resistance Hub publishes it to present individual analytical perspectives informed by experience in conflict-affected regions, including how irregular or asymmetric approaches are understood and adapted in practice. The views and interpretations expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the positions of The Resistance Hub. Publication does not imply endorsement of any actor, organization, or specific claim.
