Armed Political Organizations

Armed Political Organizations
Author: Benedetta Berti
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1421409755

Berti’s innovative framework and careful choice of case studies, presented in a jargon-free, accessible style, will make this book attractive to not only scholars and students of democratization processes but policymakers interested in conflict resolution and peacekeeping efforts.

Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?

Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?
Author: Julie Mazzei
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2009-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807898619

In an era when the global community is confronted with challenges posed by violent nonstate organizations--from FARC in Colombia to the Taliban in Afghanistan--our understanding of the nature and emergence of these groups takes on heightened importance. Julie Mazzei's timely study offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that facilitate the organization and mobilization of one of the most virulent types of these organizations, paramilitary groups (PMGs). Mazzei reconstructs in rich historical context the organization of PMGs in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, identifying the variables that together create a triad of factors enabling paramilitary emergence: ambivalent state officials, powerful military personnel, and privileged members of the economic elite. Nations embroiled in domestic conflicts often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when global demands for human rights contradict internal expectations and demands for political stability. Mazzei elucidates the importance of such circumstances in the emergence of PMGs, exploring the roles played by interests and policies at both the domestic and international levels. By offering an explanatory model of paramilitary emergence, Mazzei provides a framework to facilitate more effective policy making aimed at mitigating and undermining the political potency of these dangerous forces.

Ordering Violence

Ordering Violence
Author: Paul Staniland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501761129

In Ordering Violence, Paul Staniland advances a broad approach to armed politics—bringing together governments, insurgents, militias, and armed political parties in a shared framework—to argue that governments' perception of the ideological threats posed by armed groups drive their responses and interactions. Staniland combines a unique new dataset of state-group armed orders in India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka with detailed case studies from the region to explore when and how this model of threat perception provides insight into patterns of repression, collusion, and mutual neglect across nearly seven decades. Instead of straightforwardly responding to the material or organizational power of armed groups, Staniland finds, regimes assess how a group's politics align with their own ideological projects. Explaining, for example, why governments often use extreme repression against weak groups even while working with or tolerating more powerful armed actors, Ordering Violence provides a comprehensive overview of South Asia's complex armed politics, embedded within an analytical framework that can also speak broadly beyond the subcontinent.

Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations

Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations
Author: Morris Janowitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 1988-02-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226393194

This book includes Janowitz's seminal work, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations, with additional new analysis of Latin American nations and of the increasing significance of paramilitary and police forces in authoritarian regimes in developing nations.

In the Shadow of Violence

In the Shadow of Violence
Author: Klaus Schlichte
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2009-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 3593388170

An exploration of the techniques and strategies of successful non-state armed forces.

Rebel Politics

Rebel Politics
Author: David Brenner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501740113

Rebel Politics analyzes the changing dynamics of the civil war in Myanmar, one of the most entrenched armed conflicts in the world. Since 2011, a national peace process has gone hand-in-hand with escalating ethnic conflict. The Karen National Union (KNU), previously known for its uncompromising stance against the central government of Myanmar, became a leader in the peace process after it signed a ceasefire in 2012. Meanwhile, the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) returned to the trenches in 2011 after its own seventeen-year-long ceasefire broke down. To understand these puzzling changes, Brenner conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the KNU and KIO, analyzing the relations between rebel leaders, their rank-and-file, and local communities in the context of wider political and geopolitical transformations. Drawing on Political Sociology, Rebel Politics explains how revolutionary elites capture and lose legitimacy within their own movements and how these internal contestations drive the strategies of rebellion in unforeseen ways. Brenner presents a novel perspective that contributes to our understanding of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia, and to the study of conflict, peace and security, by highlighting the hidden social dynamics and everyday practices of political violence, ethnic conflict, rebel governance and borderland politics.

Armed Political Organizations

Armed Political Organizations
Author: Benedetta Berti
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421409747

Many armed-political movements such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) have their roots in insurrection and rebellion. The author seeks to understand when and why violent actors in a political organization choose to vote rather than bomb their way to legitimacy.

Why Women Rebel

Why Women Rebel
Author: Alexis Henshaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315456591

Why Women Rebel presents a global analysis of the extent to which women are engaged in armed, organized rebellions, and why they choose to join such rebellions. Henshaw has collected and analyzed data on women’s participation in over 70 post-Cold War rebel groups. The book provides a theoretical analysis drawing upon both mainstream literature in the social sciences and critical, feminist inquiry on women and political violence to offer a new gendered theory on why women rebel. The book reveals that women are active in over half of all rebel groups sampled and that, while the majority of rebel groups have women serving in support roles away from direct combat, approximately a third of these groups employ women in the conduct of armed attacks, and just over a quarter have women in a leadership capacity. Henshaw reaffirms the idea that women are more likely to be engaged in left-wing political organizations, but does suggest that more conservative or traditional movements may also successfully incorporate women by appealing to concerns about community rights. Addressing several gaps in the current literature on this topic, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of political science, international relations, security studies, and gender and women’s studies.

Hybrid Actors

Hybrid Actors
Author: Thanassis Cambanis
Publisher: Century Foundation Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9780870785597

Influential armed groups continue to confound policymakers, diplomats, and analysts decades after their transformational arrival on the scene in the Middle East and North Africa. The most effective of these militias can most usefully be understood as hybrid actors, which simultaneously work through, with, and against the state. This joint report from The Century Foundation identifies the factors that make some hybrid actors persistent and successful, as measured by longevity, influence, and ability to project power militarily as well as politically. It finds that three factors correlate most closely with impact: constituent loyalty, resilient state relationships, and coherent ideology. The authors of this report examined cases in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, drawing on years of fieldwork, to distinguish hybrid actors, classic nonstate proxies, and aspirants to statehood--all of which merit different analytical and policy treatment. The report demonstrates the ways that groups can shift along a spectrum as they adapt to changing conditions.

Political Institutions and Military Change

Political Institutions and Military Change
Author: Deborah Denise Avant
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

These contrasting conditions contributed to the relative ease with which the British Army adapted to new peripheral threats and the reluctance with which the U.S. Army responded to change in Vietnam.