ABSTRACT
Armed non-state actors make strategic choices like state actors do. The armed conflict between the Islamic State (IS) and the Kurdistan Region in Iraq (KRI), still ongoing at the time of writing, illustrates that such actors engage in conflict too as part of their foreign policies. Some scholars opt for new paradigms to replace the traditional state-centric paradigms for analyzing strategic decision-making the in case of armed non-state actors. This study uses a traditional foreign policy paradigm – the Rational Actor Paradigm as described by Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow – to analyze the conflict between the IS and the KRI by focusing on three key events during the conflict. The analysis shows that both of these armed non-state actors make calculated strategic choices.
