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Proxy Warriors

Stanford University Press

Contents

Figures and Tables............................................................viiAcknowledgments...............................................................ixIntroduction..................................................................11 The Origins and Persistence of State-Sponsored Militias.....................72 Indonesia...................................................................253 Iraq........................................................................564 Iran........................................................................955 Learning to Live with Militias..............................................129Notes.........................................................................143Index.........................................................................187

Chapter One

Max Weber's famous definition of the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory" is the touchstone for contemporary understanding of the entities typically considered to be the ultimate arbiters of political life. While scholars have since amended and revised its dimensions, the core emphasis on a state's ability to control violence remains unaltered. Of course, empirical cases always fall short of this ideal type. Weber himself notes that force is a means specific—not exclusive—to the state. States enjoy, at best, only a comparative advantage in its application. Where the 1980s saw efforts to bring the state back to the forefront of social science, the 1990s saw a countermovement questioning the elusive contours of the state as an ideal type. Refusing to reify the state, however, does not necessarily banish it from the conceptual lexicon. What is needed is a more nuanced schema for appreciating and categorizing the counters of actual existing states.

Few states have ever actually sought a complete monopoly over military force, much less possessed it. States engage continuously in negotiation, collaboration, and domination of external and internal challengers to assert and maintain a hold on power. Michael Mann notes that institutions of coercion rest somewhere along a continuum between absolute domination of force and the equally hypothetical Hobbesian ideal type of total anarchy. In medieval Europe, states organized large numbers of people over far-flung territories, engaging in minimally stable coercive exercises but with limited mobilization or coordination. Chains of command were mediated and indirect, with weak oversight and monitoring of those who ruled on the king's behalf. No matter how vast a king's domain, he still had to negotiate for the services of dukes and barons who retained their own independent forces. On the other hand, modern states incorporate coercion as part of their infrastructural bureaucratic power. Direct, linear chains of command extended from the sovereign to the lowest violence-wielding subaltern without the need for collaboration with such nonstate elements. The transition to modernity in Europe, then, entailed a move from small, decentralized, self-equipped militias raised by feudal lords to "large, centrally-financed and supplied armies." Such a centralized force structure was adept at what Charles Tilly calls the dual tasks of state formation: war making, the elimination or neutralization of external rivals; and state making, the elimination or neutralizing of rivals inside the territory who possess autonomous means of deploying violence.

In much of the Third World, however, competition and cooperation between the state and embedded societal elites for control of coercion remains ongoing and unresolved. This chapter articulates a theory to explain the outcome of these struggles and the variety of forms of control late-developing states (LDSs) exert over coercion. First, it sketches the concept of violence devolution as a mode of military development involving cooperation and collusion between a state and state-sponsored militias. Violence devolution is thus an alternative to central control over the use of force. Second, it uses insights from organizational theory to describe the interaction among states, insurgents, and militias and explains how the survival of different forms of military organization depends on the nature of the threat environment states inhabit. Finally, it links these general theories with a specific account of the origins of different military forms at moments of decolonization and combines these hypotheses into a typological theory that accounts for distinctive trajectories of LDSs' military development. Ultimately, it elaborates a more concrete historical explanation about the emergence of both violence devolution and centralization in the postcolonial world.

STATES, INSURGENTS, AND MILITIAS

Studies of civil war tend to depict internal conflict as dyadic engagements between the state and rebel groups, two-player games of incumbent versus challenger. Yet closer examination belies such simplification. In a detailed study of the Greek civil war, Stathis Kalyvas argues that microlevel conflicts of personal and family ambitions motivate belligerent action more than abstract political ideology. Local militias often function as free agents, variously fighting on behalf of the state or of the rebels.

Indeed, studies of violence in Latin America richly describe patterns of cooperation between states and nonstate actors, calling such activity parainstitutional violence (la violencia parainstitucional). In Colombia, for instance, the mobilization of civilians into so-called self-defense forces was an explicit state strategy to help fight leftist insurgents since at least the 1950s. The Colombian army encouraged landowners to take protection into their own hands. Said one paramilitary leader, "The struggle against the same enemy converted us into allies of the army." These nonstate actors retained considerable autonomy to use force at their own accord. In fact, by the 1980s groups like Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, originally formed to assist the army against leftist insurgents, were in alliance with drug cartels. Despite professing loyalty to the state, they refused to disarm. Similar phenomena of state-sponsored nonstate militias are visible in the likes of the Sudanese janjaweed, the Ulster loyalists, the Sierra Leonean Kamajors, armed wings of ruling political parties, plus all manner of bandits, privateers, and vigilantes with whom the state makes accommodations, however temporary.

Recognizing the ubiquity of state-sponsored militia forces complicates our understanding of civil conflict and the processes by which states pursue and accumulate power over society. Instead of a simple dichotomy, a trilateral relationship exists among state, antistate, and state-sponsored elements, as depicted in Figure 1.1. In the upper left, the state is a purveyor of violence through agents—the army, police, judges, and so forth—deemed legally entitled to enact coercion and formally part of the state apparatus. This entitlement has both domestic and international dimensions: Even if tens of thousands of their own...