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Ariel I. Ahram is an Assistant Professor in the School of International and Area Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma.

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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 citizens take up arms independently, states enjoy the imprimatur of international norms of sovereignty and the domestic legal system on its side. Moreover, reliance on international standards for validation of sovereignty has led to the diffusion of common patterns in the formal institutions of coercion. In particular, the rituals of militarism—parade ground marches, salutes of submission, the changing of the guard—are known the world over. Soldiers and police wear uniforms bearing epaulettes and insignias indicating their positions in the bureaucracy of violence. Armed forces are divided into the familiar army, navy, and air forces. Ministers of war and interior meet regularly, mutually acknowledging and reinforcing each other's standing as the sole legal purveyors of violence within their designated territories. Even clandestine security services or praetorian guards qualify as part of the state apparatus, although they also represent a limited decentralization of the state's coercive power.

In the lower right of Figure 1.1 are the counterstate actors—coup plotters, guerrillas, insurgents, and criminals. They specifically seek to displace or replace the state's authoritative position and use violence to compel changes in state behavior. As the state monopolizes the juridical claim to violence, the actions of this second class of violence wielders are necessarily illegal. Again, the level of domestic support or actual coercive power held by insurgents must be weighed against the normative bias in favor of states. Even when the guerrillas control large swaths of territory, the international community tends to deny recognition and authority to any entity that fractures existing designs of sovereignty.

Between these two poles, parainstitutional agents share characteristics of both the state and counterstate actors. Parainstitutional agents collaborate in intimidating or eliminating the state's enemies but remain outside the state's legal bureaucratic boundaries. Their affiliation with the state is loose or covert. They do not enjoy the recognition offered by international norms or domestic law. While there can be some ambiguity in the distinction between the extralegal components of militia behavior and those of state organs, there remain strong normative grounds to differentiate what is sovereign and what is not. Parainstitutional relationships exemplify what William Chambliss calls state-organized crime, where the state is complicit as an accessory before or after the fact in acts defined by law as criminal. As a leader of the striking teacher's union in Oaxaca, Mexico, expressed,

Sicarios [hired gunmen] paid by the PRI [the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party] could do things the police legally couldn't do—grab people without cause, beat them, torture them ... The only authority they had was the money they were getting, but who was to stop them? The government? The government was paying them!

Understandably, the nomenclature attached to parainstitutional groups and their leaders is subjective, veering from derogatory or euphemistic. What could be called a "warlord army" can just as easily be dubbed a "village protection force." The origins of these groups also vary. Robert Bates notes that in Africa's civil wars the youth wings of political parties, regional coalitions, and ethnic groups have all been known to "transmute into militias" under the right conditions. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, every bandit will "sooner or later be tempted to take the easy road ... [becoming] a retainer of the lords, a member of some strong-arm squad which comes to terms with the structures of official power." Their activities, however, remain outside a formal legal framework. This is a crucial distinction between parainstitutional forces and private military contractors, whose role as purveyors of violence is explicitly set out in a legal contract between the state and the firm.

ORGANIZATION FORMATS AND INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE

Why do states—assumed to jealously guard the prerogative of violence—rely on nonstate actors? How do those engaging in violence devolution survive this three-way competition? Both cooperative and competitive interactions among states, insurgents, and parainstitutional militias depend critically on their respective organizational structures and cultures. Abdelkader Sinno observes that organizational structure limits the range of coercive strategies that can be initiated or countered by insurgents. Similarly, Jeremy Weinstein argues that different organizational formats provide different incentives and constraints for coordination, monitoring, and discipline of individuals within the group, which in turn have an impact on the functional capacity of these organizations to vie with one another. The same consequences stem from a state's organization of coercive institutions.

In Oliver Williamson's schema of organizational forms, conventional state militaries represent a unitary-form (U-form) organization, while paramilitary units map onto a multidivisional (M-form) organizational structure. The differences between these forms are shown visually in Figures 2 and 3. U-form organizations are characterized by a hierarchical chain of command and division of units by functional specialization. Military organizations following this pattern adopt the familiar tripartite functional division of army, navy, and air force, differentiated by their specialization in inflicting violence through different means. M-form organizations, in contrast, are characterized by a weblike command structure built around a number of territorially specific and self-contained units. In an M-form organization, each unit is quasi-autonomous, responsible for overseeing every operation within its given territory. Militarily, this means that the state maintains contact with various redundant cells that are differentiated by geography rather than specialization.

The different organizational forms and different divisions of labor introduce specific constraints on supervision and, conversely, opportunities for deception at different levels of M-form and U-form organizations. Table 1 summarizes these effects. M-form organizations give the subunit director the ability and incentive to innovate. Their decentralization, however, makes it harder for the state to monitor and control independent militia leaders, thus exacerbating the tensions between principal and agent. To incite better performance, states often promote competition between subunits. U-form organizations, in contrast, are easier to control because each unit is responsible for only one operational task. But U-form organizations are also less flexible because a unit leader can become myopic and focus solely on a particular task rather than on the larger organizational goal.

The devolution of command and control gives militia commanders latitude to improvise techniques of repression and surveillance specifically suited to their environments. Raised and retained on a part-time and ad hoc basis, they are also cheaper than regular militaries to deploy for protracted engagements in low-intensity warfare. Because militia commanders are local elites, they have superior knowledge of the physical and cultural terrain in their respective territories. There are additionally normative or cultural reasons for states to rely on militias. Revolutionary states often adopt military doctrines emphasizing popular participation in military affairs and thus encourage the formation of civilian militias. By colluding with nonstate actors, states gain plausible deniability for flagrant violence committed against civilians in the course of often brutal counterinsurgency campaigns.

The use of state-sponsored militias, however, also entails some significant trade-offs stemming from the state's loss of control over its agents. As Kalyvas notes, militias may not share the state's ideological goals or owe it much allegiance; their fighters might seek economic gain or local status more than any particular political agenda. This contributes to the use of violence in a manner that is counterproductive to the state's ends. Militia leaders can subvert central authority in a number of ways. They can refuse to comply with the state's demands, either by neglecting to target those the state identifies as dangerous or by attacking those groups the state identifies as friendly. They can amass their own power base by setting up a "state-within-a-state," by seceding, or even by marching on the capital to depose the regime. This danger increases when militias can collaborate with one another and when they have an independent source of revenue or support. Colombia is just one of a myriad of countries in which both insurgents and militias gained untold autonomy by embedding themselves in a black-market economy of narcotics and other illicit goods. Still, it is important to note that for some groups the economic threshold for self-sufficiency is relatively low.

To manage these risks, LDSs rely on techniques familiar to any sixteenth-century European monarch beset by unruly vassals. Joel Migdal identifies three critical tactics of state survival. The first is to remove and relocate the local elites involved in raising militias. Those with too strong a foothold in a particular region or group are co-opted to serve in higher office, where they can be isolated from their domestic constituency. Second, and closely related, is to grant nonmerit appointments to those with kinship or patronage ties to state elites over those with greater expertise or competence. This ensures that the local agents have an incentive to remain loyal to the central government. In the Middle East, for instance, states replace tribal chiefs they consider too autonomous with more pliable brothers, uncles, cousins, or other kin. If one clan becomes too powerful, the state sanctions the creation of a rival tribe. The third tool is what Migdal calls "dirty tricks": turning state coercive organs or other militia groups against one another. This in effect fosters a small-scale civil war between two erstwhile state agents. Collectively, these techniques allow states to function as brokers, maintaining exclusive ties with local non-state actors while blocking any individual militia leader's attempt to unite with other forces in collective action against the state.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Proxy Warriorsby Ariel I. Ahram Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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