The Role of State-Sponsored Militias in Genocide
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09546553.2012.734875
ISSN1556-1836
Autores Tópico(s)Political Conflict and Governance
ResumoAbstract This article explains how and why armed, non-state actors collaborate with states to inflict massive levels of violence. Regime type and state capacity interact to provide state elites a menu of repertoires for implementing violence, some emphasizing direct state action, others emphasizing cooperation and alliance between state and armed, non-state actors. Rather than struggling in vain to build strong states to eliminate armed non-state actors and establish a monopoly over the use of force, averting genocide might necessitate recruiting and strengthening the power of indigenous, armed non-state actors. Keywords: conflict resolutiongenocidemass violencemilitiasparamilitaries Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the participants and organizers of the 2011 "Resisting the Path to Genocide" workshop at the University of Southern California, for which this article was originally prepared. The author also thanks Clark McCauley, Christian Gerlach, Charles King, Marni Lefkowitz Ahram, and the editors of Terrorism and Political Violence for their careful reading and response to earlier drafts of this article. Notes United Nations, Report of the Secretary General to the Security Council on the Protection of Civilians, 9/1999/957 (New York: Author, September 8, 1999); see also Michael Ignatieff, "Intervention and State Failure," in Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner, eds., The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 236. For purposes of this article, the term "mass" is used to qualify killing and violence only in relation to the number of targets of violence, not the numbers of individuals who perpetrated it. As such, mass killing should be seen as a synonym for genocide or politicide. Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1976), 18. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3–4. Anton Weiss-Wendt, "The State and Genocide," in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 100. Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19. Max Weber, "Politics as Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78 (italics in original). This emphasis on legal force remains central to many contemporary discussions of the state. See Margaret Levi, "The State of the Study of the State," in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (New York: W.W. 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See also Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Deadly Communities: Local Political Milieus and the Persecution of Jews in Occupied Poland," Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 3 (2011): 259–283. Of the 617 cases of attacks on unarmed civilians that claim more than twenty-five lives between 1989 and 2008 recorded in the Uppsala Conflict Data Sets' One-Sided Violence dataset, 403 (65%) were carried out by non-state actors. See Kristine Eck and Lisa Hultman, "Violence Against Civilians in War," Journal of Peace Research, 44, no. 2 (2007): 233–246. Chirot and McCauley, Why Not Kill Them All? (see note 6 above), 92. Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Benjamin A. 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Sven Chojnacki and Zeljko Branovic, "New Modes of Security: The Violent Making and Unmaking of Governance in War-Torn Areas of Limited Statehood," in Thomas Risse, ed., Governance Without a State: Policies and Politics in Areas of Limited Statehood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 91. For a minimalist definition of human security, see S. Neil MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong, Human Security and the U.N.: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Additional informationNotes on contributorsAriel I. Ahram Ariel I. Ahram is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public & International Affairs at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State Sponsored Militias (Stanford, 2011).
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