This book describes militias as significant and prevalent actors in today’s international security environment. To separate them from other types of violent non-state groups, such as terrorists, guerrillas and insurgents, the author describes militias as local guardians that use violence to fill a variety of political, social and security gaps, which have created vulnerabilities for their particular constituencies. Although militias are local in orientation, their effects are not contained to particular countries and have only added to the instability in the international system. This book explores how militias contribute to international security issues by furthering state fragility, undermining human rights and democratization, enabling illicit trafficking, prolonging internal conflicts and fostering proxy wars.

This book examines the phenomenon of paramilitarism across Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, offering a nuanced perspective while identifying key patterns in the way paramilitary violence is implicated in processes of capital accumulation, state-building, and the reproduction of social power. Paramilitary violence, a key modality of coercion in the era of globalization, has been pursued by states and dominant classes in the Global South, to reproduce or extend their power over subaltern groups. Paramilitary groups are responsible for atrocities, including extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture, rape, and forced displacement. The book integrates empirically rich investigations into an emergent theory of political violence, capturing the relationship between parastatal armed actors, capital, and the state. The analysis sheds light on globally relevant phenomena such as the end of the Cold War, the shifting role of US hegemony, and evolving nature of the nation-state. The book is suitable for academics, graduate and upper-year undergraduate students, and policy-makers in development, human rights, and violence prevention. Given its interdisciplinary subject, it appeals to scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, sociology, political anthropology, development, peace and conflict, security and terrorism, international relations, and global studies.

This edited book demonstrates a new multidimensional comprehension of the relationship between war, the military and civil society by exploring the global rise of paramilitary culture. Moving beyond binary understandings that inform the militarization of culture thesis and examining various national and cultural contexts, the collection outlines ways in which a process of paramilitarization is shaping the world through the promotion of new warrior archetypes. It is argued that while the paramilitary hero is associated with military themes, their character is in tension with the central principals of modern military organization, something that often challenges the state’s perceived monopoly on violence. As such paramilitization has profound implications for institutional military identity, the influence of paramilitary organizations and broadly how organised violence is popularly understood

From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts. Ungor presents a comparative and global overview of paramilitarism, showing how states use it to successfully outsource mass political violence against civilians.

Heterarchy in World Politics challenges the fundamental framing of international relations and world politics. IR theory has always been dominated by the presumption that world politics is, at its core, a system of states. However, this has always been problematic, challengeable, time-bound, and increasingly anachronistic. In the 21st century, world politics is becoming increasingly multi-nodal and characterized by "heterarchy" – the coexistence and conflict between differently structured micro- and meso quasi-hierarchies that compete and overlap not only across borders but also across economic-financial sectors and social groupings. Thinking about international order in terms of heterarchy is a paradigm shift away from the mainstream "competing paradigms" of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. This book explores how, since the mid-20th century, the dialectic of globalization and fragmentation has caught states and the interstate system in the complex evolutionary process toward heterarchy. These heterarchical institutions and processes are characterized by increasing autonomy and special interest capture. The process of heterarchy empowers strategically situated agents — especially agents with substantial autonomous resources, and in particular economic resources — in multi-nodal competing institutions with overlapping jurisdictions. The result is the decreasing capacity of macro-states to control both domestic and transnational political/economic processes. In this book, the authors demonstrate that this is not a simple breakdown of states and the states system; it is in fact the early stages of a structural evolution of world politics. This book will interest students, scholars and researchers of international relations theory. It will also have significant appeal in the fields of world politics, security studies, war studies, peace studies, global governance studies, political science, political economy, political power studies, and the social sciences more generally.

Doin' Dirty

This is a comprehensive study that examines the sources of refugee flows, in particular as they relate to political persecution, trafficking, human slavery, and human rights challenges. Liberal democratic states have been contending with significant refugee inflows. The migration of large populations to Europe and North America is driven by various factors, including regional conflicts, the impacts of global warming, political opposition to autocratic regimes, and societal as well as cultural relations. The purpose of this study is to understand the nature of human rights challenges, to cut through false perceptions and myths in relation to the sources of migration and refugee flows, and to provide a deeper understanding for academics and practitioners in relation to the support for refugees and victims of human slavery.