Armed Group Structure and Violence in Civil Wars PDF Download

Author: Roos Haer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317569172
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book examines whether differences in the organizational structure of armed groups shape patterns of human rights violations in civil wars. Since the end of World War II, civil wars have been characterized by extremely high numbers of civilian casualties. However, the exact extent of civilian suffering varies across time, conflict, and geographic region. Recently, a new strand of research has emerged, primarily focused on studying the dynamics underlying the variation in civilian abuse by examining the characteristics of the armed groups and how these characteristics influence the armed groups’ behaviour towards the civilian population. With reference to principal-agent theory and data on the organizational structure of more than 70 armed groups active worldwide from 1989 onwards, the author’s analysis functions both on the level of the armed group and on the level of the individual via personal interviews with combatants. Offering a unique insight into how factors such as recruitment methods, hierarchy and organizational commitment may affect the likelihood of civilian abuse by combatants, this book will be of much interest to students of political violence, civil wars, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

Author: Sarah Zukerman Daly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107566835
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nearly half of all countries emerging from civil conflict relapse into war within a few years of signing a peace agreement. The postwar trajectories of armed groups vary from organizational cohesion to dissolution, demilitarization to remilitarization. In Organized Violence after Civil War, Daly analyzes evidence from thirty-seven militia groups in Colombia, demonstrating that the primary driving force behind these changes is the variation in recruitment patterns within, and between, the warring groups. She documents the transition from war to peace through interviews with militia commanders, combatants and victims. Using rich ex-combatant survey data and geo-coded information on violence over fifty years of war, Daly explains the dynamics inside armed organizations and the strategic interactions among them. She also shows how the theory may be used beyond Colombia, both within the region of Latin America and across the rest of the world.

Author: Stathis N. Kalyvas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945692X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Author: Amelia Hoover Green
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726498
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Why do some military and rebel groups commit many types of violence, creating an impression of senseless chaos, whereas others carefully control violence against civilians? A classic catch-22 faces the leaders of armed groups and provides the title for Amelia Hoover Green’s book. Leaders need large groups of people willing to kill and maim—but to do so only under strict control. How can commanders control violence when fighters who are not under direct supervision experience extraordinary stress, fear, and anger? The Commander’s Dilemma argues that discipline is not enough in wartime. Restraint occurs when fighters know why they are fighting and believe in the cause—that is, when commanders invest in political education. Drawing on extraordinary evidence about state and nonstate groups in El Salvador, and extending her argument to the Mano River wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Amelia Hoover Green shows that investments in political education can improve human rights outcomes even where rational incentives for restraint are weak—and that groups whose fighters lack a sense of purpose may engage in massive violence even where incentives for restraint are strong. Hoover Green concludes that high levels of violence against civilians should be considered a "default setting," not an aberration.

Author: Laia Balcells
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108210554
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This innovative book connects pre-war politics to patterns of violence during civil war. It argues that both local political rivalry and local revenge account for violence against civilians. Armed groups perpetrate direct violence jointly with local civilians, who collaborate when violence can help them gain or consolidate local political control. As civil war continues, revenge motives also come into play, leading to spirals of violence at a local level. In an important contribution to the study of the Spanish Civil War, Balcells combines statistical analyses with ethnographic and qualitative research to provide new insights to scholars and academic researchers with an interest in civil war, politics and conflict processes. Rivalry and Revenge is theoretically and empirically rich, and it offers a theory and method generalizable to a wide set of cases.

Author: Paul Staniland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501761129
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
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.

Author: Paul Staniland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471028
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Insurgent cohesion is central to explaining patterns of violence, the effectiveness of counterinsurgency, and civil war outcomes. Cohesive insurgent groups produce more effective war-fighting forces and are more credible negotiators; organizational cohesion shapes both the duration of wars and their ultimate resolution. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland explains why insurgent leaders differ so radically in their ability to build strong organizations and why the cohesion of armed groups changes over time during conflicts. He outlines a new way of thinking about the sources and structure of insurgent groups, distinguishing among integrated, vanguard, parochial, and fragmented groups. Staniland compares insurgent groups, their differing social bases, and how the nature of the coalitions and networks within which these armed groups were built has determined their discipline and internal control. He examines insurgent groups in Afghanistan, 1975 to the present day, Kashmir (1988–2003), Sri Lanka from the 1970s to the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, and several communist uprisings in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The initial organization of an insurgent group depends on the position of its leaders in prewar political networks. These social bases shape what leaders can and cannot do when they build a new insurgent group. Counterinsurgency, insurgent strategy, and international intervention can cause organizational change. During war, insurgent groups are embedded in social ties that determine they how they organize, fight, and negotiate; as these ties shift, organizational structure changes as well.

Author: Bruno Charbonneau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000425207
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Comparing armed conflicts primes the production of categories that, when mobilized, can alter the trajectories of the conflicts. Considering the political dynamism of spaces of conflict and intervention, and that practitioners regularly seek out academic expertise, this book discusses the possibilities and limits of comparative approaches to understanding armed conflict and intervention. Capacity-building experts, development workers, international organizations, and diplomats use their previous experiences and bring them into new contexts to understand and respond to their environment. Conflict actors can also make comparisons to buttress their political position in negotiations, consolidate their control over fighters, and as calls for transnational rebel solidarity. The use of such comparisons is an inherently political move and it has an impact on the production of scientific knowledge, on conflict dynamics themselves, and on the formulation and implementation of conflict management policy: comparison is inherently a practice of order-making. While there are important epistemological and methodological stakes associated with researchers engaging in comparison, there are also important productive effects connected to the research avenues taken. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Civil Wars.

Author: Ana Arjona
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316432386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

Author: Mats Berdal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134023138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This book looks at the political reintegration of armed groups after civil wars and the challenges of transforming ‘rebel’, ‘insurgent’ or other non-state armed groups into viable political entities. Drawing on eight case studies, the definition of ‘armed groups’ here ranges from militias, paramilitary forces, police units of various kinds to intelligence outfits. Likewise, the definition of ‘political integration’ or ‘re-integration’ has not been restricted to the formation of political parties, but is understood broadly as active participation in politics, policy-making or public debate through parties, newspapers, social organisations, think-tanks, NGOs or public service. The book seeks to locate or contextualise individual cases within their distinctive social, cultural and historical settings. As such it differs from much of the donor-driven literature that has tended to abstract the challenge of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) from their political and historical context, focusing instead on technical or bureaucratic issues raised by the DDR process. Among the issues covered by the volume as a whole, three stand out: first, the role of political settlements in creating legitimate opportunities for erstwhile leaders of armed factions; second, the ability of reintegration programmes to create genuine socio-economic opportunities that can absorb former fighters as functional members of their communities; and third, the processes involved in transforming an entire rebel movement into a viable political party, movement or, more generally, allowing it to participate in political life. This book will be of great interest to students of security and development, peace and conflict studies, and IR in general, as well as practitioners and policymakers. Mats Berdal is Professor of Security and Development in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From 2000 to 2003 he was Director of Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. Mats Berdal is a Visiting Professor at the National Defence and Command College, Oslo. David Ucko is the Programme Coordinator & Research Fellow for the Conflict, Security & Development Research Group, King's College London.