This chapter analyses the legal qualification of complex conflict situations that feature more than two conflict parties. It examines whether such situations qualify as a single internationalized armed conflict or a number of independent international and non-international armed conflicts. With this in mind, this chapter puts forward a model based on the retention of autonomy of the allied conflict parties. It argues that once the autonomy is foregone and replaced with a single use of force by the parties, the law of international armed conflict applies ‘globally’ to the situation at hand. However, until that moment, the situation should be seen as ‘mixed’; in other words, as a set of mutually independent conflict pairs.