Cognitive Radio Networks have been proposed as a promising solution for the spectrum deficiency problem. Even though, because of the opportunistic access and heterogeneity nature of these networks, they are exposed to threats such as the presence of jammer which aims to jeopardize the network transmissions. In this article, we introduce an anti-jamming cooperative framework to mitigate or minimize the impact of the jammer on the cognitive radio network. In the proposed solution, the secondary coordinator distributes the Secondary Users (SU) over the selected channel and pairs the SUs to form cooperative coalitions which utilize cooperative transmission to establish more robust transmission links to overcome the effect of the jammer power. Stackelberg game is used to model the interaction between the jammer and the network coordinator. The outcomes show the superiority of using cooperative transmission over the traditional direct transmission. Also, the performance of the secondary network enhances as the number of SUs increases due to the higher probability of forming cooperative groups. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.