Non-state Groups Research Articles

Deterrence of nuclear terrorism in the context of South Asia

ABSTRACTStability among the great powers during the Cold War is widely theorized in terms of nuclear deterrence. Rationality of States and their preference for survival are the basis of nuclear deterrence. The rationality of non-state terrorist groups is different from that of nation-states. Even though they are also rational actors with their own hierarchy of preferences, survival may not be their ultimate goal. Deterrence of nuclear terrorism is therefore different from deterrence against states. South Asia is more vulnerable to nuclear terrorism than any other region of the world for many reasons. This article analyzes the possibility of nuclear terrorism and the ways of deterrence against it in the context of South Asia.

A Decade Later and Still on Target: Revisiting the 2006 Israeli Targeted Killing Decision

The increasing use by States of extraterritorial targeted killing as a counter-terrorism tool in recent years has given rise to controversial questions concerning its legality under international law. This article first explores the international legal regimes purporting to govern State-sponsored targeted killing and evaluates their ability to effectively regulate it. It then focuses on the use of targeted killing by States against members of non-State terror groups in an international armed conflict. In this regard, the article revisits the 2006 landmark decision of the Israeli Supreme Court in the Targeted Killing case and evaluates its influence and legacy over the past decade. It argues that this decision remains relevant and instructive since it exposes some of the lingering weaknesses of international law in governing the use of targeted killing as a counter-terrorism tool, while at the same time demonstrating how such weaknesses may be overcome within the existing international legal framework. The impact of the decision in this regard is clearly evident in the evolution of Israel’s targeted killing practice over the past decade.

The connectivity of ethnic displays: new codes for identity in northern Laos

In Laos, cultural festivals and other forms of ethnic display communicate locality and ethnicity to external agencies, in particular the nation state. This article documents strategies of identity-making in a small festival that was staged spontaneously in a Rmeet (Lamet) village. The chosen representations were conventional: dance, music, clothing. The Rmeet thereby employed a festival code used by numerous minorities worldwide. But these recently invented traditions are continuous with earlier representations that addressed various categories of strangers, including historic states and non-state groups. What has changed is the connectivity of the representations. Dance or costume used to represent external relationships in the past, but have been recoded for present use. Moreover, Rmeet have appropriated a New Year’s festival invented by the neighboring Khmu. Thus, ethnic displays appear as the most recent way of communicating difference in a code that connects them with the state, neighboring ethnicities, and a global language of locality.

Explaining Patterns of Urban Violence in Medellin, Colombia

Latin America is one of the world’s most violent regions, with 40 of the 50 most violent cities, but with only 8% of the world’s population, and a staggering 33% of global homicides. At the forefront of these high levels of violence are gangs that are more flexible and persistent than previously thought. This paper provides a discussion on gangs in one Latin American city, Medellin, Colombia, where different non-state groups have contributed to changing patterns of homicide rates. The paper presents preliminary findings to show how, despite the city experiencing a 90% reduction in homicide rates in less than 25 years, violent non-state groups have become embedded as part and product of their environment, acting as coherent, logical and functional players, linked to the structural inequalities and institutional fragility of the larger society.

Street Fights: The Commodification of Place Names in Post-Taliban Kabul City

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 ended the Taliban rule and brought to power a coalition government whose members had spent most of the previous decade fighting each other. After 2001, the rivalry between these groups was mainly pursued in the cultural sphere where each was fighting to shape the narrative of the war. Place names have been one of the main domains in which this ideological conflict has been fought. The contestation over place names in Kabul city has turned these mundane geographical signs into coveted commodities of great symbolic significance. This article examines the practice of place naming in post-Taliban Kabul to explore the cultural challenges of state-building in a postwar city. Based on official data and field observations, this article is informed by recent theoretical developments in the field of critical toponymy and specifically draws on the emerging debates on commodification of place names. In the post-Taliban era, the article shows, place names have turned into resources for accumulation of symbolic capital and political recognition. As a result, the state offers toponyms to buy political loyalty and nonstate groups often appropriate them illegally. The article contributes to existing scholarship on commodification of place names by linking it to questions of postwar state-building and spatialization of ethnic identity.

Introduction

Seeking to expand the domain of the political beyond normative understandings of the state, the articles in this special edition examine the performative aspects of governance and state-making in Southeast Asia. Combining historical and contemporary case studies, this collection brings together four examples of performative statecraft from Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. The collection coheres around the analytical optic of performance, with particular emphasis on the performative repertoires developed by religious militas and non-state security groups. This analytical optic allows the contributors to gauge how such non-state groups conceive and engage with the state and its institutions, and to provide fresh insights on the performative aspects of state-making processes.

Karachi: Organized Crime in a Key Megacity

IntroductionMegacities are developing across many regions of the world - in particular in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. These cities are growing rapidly as migrants from rural areas or those escaping conflicts gravitate to urban areas. Migrants often settle in informal urban settlements that frequently lack infrastructure and services. In the absence of state presence, or in areas where the state's presence is substantially weakened, criminals and other non-state actors become the providers of services needed by citizens. Many security specialists write that the rise of criminal groups in megacities presents a critical challenge to global stability. They suggest that poor governance by states and the rise of disgruntled populations in these megacities may result in alternative structures of governance where gangs and warlords assert control over urban territory.1Research in Karachi, a city in which criminal organizations, terrorists and crime-terror groups are all powerful actors, suggests a different reality. Crime and violence are deployed strategically by criminals in Karachi for economic and political gain. Yet they are just one group competing for power in an environment in which every political player is armed and has a stake in the city.Despite the presence of much intra-personal and politically motivated violence, including high rates of homicide, there is an order in Karachi that is established from the bottom up rather than the top down. This order is not entirely separate from the state but-as this analysis will show-these diverse criminalized non-state actors manipulate the state and are in turn manipulated by the state.The reason that many fail to see the order that exists in this chaos is that they use Western concepts of nation-building or state formation to analyze the new urban reality of the developing world. Thus they miss the distinctive relationships that exist between state and non-state actors in the megacities of the developing world, of which Karachi is a prime example.This paper analyzes how criminalized non-state groups are connected to the wider political and economic contexts in which they operate. The relationships between organized crime and the state are different in Karachi from those that exist in Sicily, Italy. Yet the Sicilian context provides the overarching framework for our understanding of crime-state relationships. In Sicily, family relationships determine the structures of criminal groups and votes are delivered to politicians in return for contracts and tolerance of their activities. Criminal groups are loyal to the state and have grown along with the economic development of the Italian state since World War II.2In contrast, in Karachi, non-state actors do not benefit as directly from a parasitic relationship to the state. This is true, in part, because the state has less to give. Moreover, there is less of an exchange relationship between the non-state actors and political structures than in Italy. Rather, much more complex relationships exist between the state and the non-state actors in this difficult environment in which crime and terror groups have assumed many functions that are vital for the survival of citizens, such as the provision of housing and water.Karachi: Order and Disorder in this MegacityKarachi, a city with a population of approximately twenty million, contributes at least a quarter of Pakistan's GDP and serves as its primary port. Through its port flow many illicit commodities including drugs,3 ensuring the centrality of illegal commerce to the economic life of the city, and by extension, the country.Karachi's political structure is distinctive in having criminal groups, terror groups (Al-Qaeda, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT)), and crime-terror groups (D-company) as major actors in the political and economic environment of this great port city. Even its primary political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement or MQM (party representing migrants) as it is popularly known, is credited for introducing systematic violence and crime to the city's politics. …

Provocation and the Strategy of Terrorist and Guerrilla Attacks

AbstractViolent nonstate groups are usually weaker than the states they target. Theory suggests that groups carefully condition their choice of tactics on anticipated state response. Yet scholars know very little about whether and how groups strategically plan attacks in anticipation of state response. Scholars do not know if and under what conditions groups employ violent tactics to provoke or avoid a forceful state response, although extant theory is consistent with both possibilities. Relatedly, there is little systematic evidence about why groups choose terrorist or guerrilla tactics and how this choice relates to anticipated state response. I develop a theoretical and empirical model of the interaction between groups and states that generates unique evidence on all three fronts. Using data on attacks in Western Europe from 1950 to 2004, I show that guerrilla attacks are sometimes associated with provoking forceful state response, whereas terrorist attacks are generally associated with avoiding forceful response. Groups effectively choose their tactics to avoid forceful state responses that are too damaging for themselves but provoke forceful responses that disproportionately harm civilians. These findings survive several robustness and model specification tests.

Seleção Adversa e Intervenção Humanitária: Mitigação de Efeitos Indesejáveis

Este artigo dedica-se a analisar as posições e relações entre os atores em um cenário de possibilidade intervenção humanitária, para isso lançando mão de elementos da análise econômica. A possibilidade de intervenção humanitária analisada é aquela em que há um conflito armado não internacional entre as forças oficiais de um Estado e um grupo de combatentes não estatais interno. São tecidas considerações sobre a possível intervenção de um Estado, terceiro ao conflito, fornecendo inteligência, suprimentos, munição, logística, saúde, treinamento, armas ou mesmo combatentes. Aplica-se a este cenário a teoria do principal-agente, mecanismos de risco moral e seleção adversa, bem como, dilema de comprometimento. Este artigo sugere que uma regulação internacional, prévia, permanente e vinculante sobre a questão seria vantajosa para todos os atores envolvidos que estejam interessados na redução do sofrimento humano, desenvolvimento de diálogo e construção de estabilidade e paz.

Providing security or protecting interests? Government interventions in violent communal conflicts in Africa

What factors drive governments’ decisions to intervene in local conflicts within their borders? Communal conflict – that is, organized violence between non-state groups that are mobilized along a shared communal identity – kills thousands each year and severely impacts local livelihoods, at times threatening to spread and affect entire regions. Given the state’s assumed monopoly over the legitimate use of force, we should expect the concerned governments to be critical actors of the overall effort to restore peace in cases of local communal conflict, but empirical evidence indicates that central states tend to only intervene in some cases but not in others. This phenomenon has so far been understudied and the variations in states’ efforts to manage these conflicts remain unexplained. This article presents the first quantitative study of state intervention in communal conflicts. Building on existing scholarly work, I argue that state intervention is explained by a combination of strategic interests and state capacity, and that interests related to ethnic constituencies and land control play an important part in explaining governments’ strategies. These propositions find support in a statistical analysis covering sub-Saharan Africa from 1989 to 2010.

Bringing the transnational into ‘new wars’: the case of islamic state

Abstract In her seminal 1998 work on ‘new wars’ Mary Kaldor developed a heuristic framework usefully for understanding the characteristics of armed non-state groups involved in contemporary conflicts. This framework was derived from analysing the 1992-1995 Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict. Some two decades after this however, adjustments may now be necessary. A focussed examination of the strategy used during 2014 by Islamic State Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) reveals Kaldor’s framework may now need to include a more explicit focus on the transnational. Since the mid-1990s, the transnational has been made more accessible by advances in social media in particular, and by globalization more generally. ISIS’s use of the transnational indicates this may be an area that astute non-state actors can advantageously exploit - perhaps better than states - although there are some difficulties involved. ISIS’s success suggests that the transnational may in time have greater influence on the politics of international society.

Symbolic transformation of environmental governance: implementation of EU biodiversity policy in Bulgaria and Croatia between Europeanization and domestic politics

In this paper, we explore how European and domestic factors have shaped environmental governance in the case of European Union biodiversity policy implementation in Bulgaria and Croatia. We argue that a ‘symbolic transformation’ of environmental governance in Bulgaria and Croatia has occurred, as the interplay between Europeanization and domestic politics has led to differential empowerment of state and non-state actors resulting in ineffective environmental governance. While proenvironment non-state groups (environmental non-governmental organizations, scientists) and European Union institutions were empowered in the phase of formal compliance, economic interest groups have held sway over the phase of practical (non-)compliance. At the same time, state actors have responded rationally to retain their power by adapting to opposing forces from above and below. We conclude by discussing the ‘symbolic transformation’ of environmental governance shifting between ‘command-and-control’ and ‘non-hierarchical’ coordination with regards to the transformative power of Europe in light of Europeanization research in old and new European Union member states.

Printing power: 3-D printing and threats to state security

Recent advances in the field of additive manufacturing—more popularly known as ‘3-D’ printing—have revolutionized multiple fields such as medicine and manufacturing. We argue that this emerging technology also brings with it as yet unforeseen threats to state security, particularly as it relates to the empowerment of non-state actors. Previously these groups have been limited in their ability to pursue weapons programs such as those which would produce weapons of mass destruction by high technical barriers and costs. Consequently, existing non-proliferation regimes have been designed with these limitations in mind and are largely targeted at preventing the transfer of these weapons from states to non-state groups. However, advances in additive manufacturing will remove many of these barriers and empower non-state groups in ways which will directly challenge the supremacy and security of states. We evaluate the most likely advances in this technology, the ways in which these groups will seek to capitalize on these developments, and also suggest a number of possible strategies by which states can counter this emerging threat. Though many of the developments discussed here lie in the future, it is not too soon for states to begin developing methods of addressing these challenges.

The Development of the US National Missile Defense and its Impact on the International Security

The article reflects the US officials' point of view on the development of its national missile defense. The major threat to international security is the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. The United States and the former Soviet Union made huge efforts to reduce and limit offensive arms. However, presently the proliferation of ballistic missiles spreads all over the world, especially in the Middle East, because of the ballistic missile technology falling into the hands of hostile non-state groups. Missile defenses can provide a permanent presence in a region and discourage adversaries from believing they can use ballistic missiles to coerce or intimidate the U.S. or its allies. With the possible attack regional missile defense systems will be promptly mobilized to enhance an effective deterrent. The ultimate goal of such large-scale missile defense deployment is to convince the adversaries that the use of ballistic missiles is useless in military terms and that any attack on the United States and its allies is doomed to failure. The United States has missile defense cooperative programs with a number of allies, including United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, Italy and many others. The Missile Defense Agency also actively participates in NATO activities to maximize opportunities to develop an integrated NATO ballistic missile defense capability. The initiative of the development of US BMD naturally belongs to the United States. That country has enormous technological, financial, economic, military and institutional capabilities, exceeding by far those of the other NATO members combined.

Milware: The Implications of State Authored Malicious Software

The pervasive development and deployment of malicious software by states presents a new challenge for the information security and policy communities because of the resource advantage and legal status of governments. The difference between state and non-state authored code is typically described in vague terms of sophistication, contributing to the inaccurate confirmation bias of many that states simply 'do it better'. This paper attempts to determine if state authored code is demonstrably different from that written by non-state actors and if so, how. To do so, we examine a collection of malware samples which, through existing analytic techniques, have been attributed to a mix of state and non-state actors. Reviewing technical information available in the public domain for each sample, reverse-engineering a sub-set, we determine that there is a set of criteria by which state authored code can be differentiated from the conventional malware of non-state groups. This MAlicious Software Sophistication or MASS index relies on a set of characteristics which describe the behavior and construction of malware including the severity of exploits and customization of the payload. In addition to highlighting these particular differences, the paper discusses several policy implications which arise from identifying a separate class of state-authored code. This is an interdisciplinary effort and pilot project based on a limited dataset however the conclusions drawn have important ramifications for both the information security and relevant policymaking communities.

Behavioral Patterns among (Violent) Non-State Actors: A Study of Complementary Governance

This article is part of a multi-year study of governance structures in the midst of insecurity and organized crime in fragile sub-state regions, where in the absence of a strong state, non-state actors (like insurgents, traffickers and tribal warlords) engage in political and socioeconomic governance. Building on our prior work on West Africa and the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal belt, this paper focuses on the Andean borderlands, drawing on recent fieldwork in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. We explore patterns of behavior in which competition among violent non-state actors is not the norm. Instead, several instances were found in which violent non-state actors work collaboratively or have tacit non-interference agreements to provide public goods through arrangements we characterize as “complementary governance.” We therefore argue that, to understand how illicit authority emerges, it is not sufficient to consider one armed non-state actor in isolation or in a dichotomy to the state. As we contend, we have to take into account the complex connections and interactions among different (violent) non-state structures. Moving beyond state versus non-state governance to governance that is constitutive of various non-state groups, the perspective put forward in this article thus is aimed to enrich the current debate on governance and security.

Deterrence and Counterdeterrence in the Fight Against Global Terror

A key challenge in modern foreign policy stems from the diculty governments face from organized non-state groups who might pose a threat of global terrorism. We show that factions within non-state groups, both moderate and extremist, have an incentive to strategically misrepresent their real intentions. First, extremist factions wish to appear moderate, and will attempt to exploit the politician’s uncertainty regarding the true ideological composition of the group to conduct terrorist activities unencumbered. Second, moderates will strategically seek to conform to perceptions of what constitutes a terrorist group to quell internal disagreement using the threat of intervention that would be triggered by signs of weakness and internal division inside the group. We also address the use of the use of commited strategies that are less responsive to strategic manipulation from factions within non-state groups, and show that reluctance for military intervention is a strategic advantage for politicians designing counterterrorism.

TERORIZMAS IR PARTIZANINIS KARAS – DVI SUKILIMO FORMOS

This article deals with the phenomenon of political violence. The concept of “armed resistance” (Lithuanian: ginkluotas pasipriešinimas) is introduced to describe politi­cal violence perpetrated by non-state actors or subnational groups. The Lithuanian concept of “armed resistance” in general corresponds to the English concept of “in­surgency”.Many problems related to the definitions of concepts of “insurgency”, “guer­rilla warfare” and “terrorism” are pointed out. The article states that the identified concepts are often used incorrectly in foreign and Lithuanian academic publications. Very often these concepts of “insurgent”, “guerrilla fighter”, and “terrorist” are used as synonyms. One of the main reasons for misuse of the mentioned concepts is the lack of related academic literature. Misuse of the terms insurgents, guerrillas and ter­rorists by official governmental institutions is also underlined.It is argued in the article that proper understanding of the armed resistance is needed. To get such an understanding one needs to distinguish political violence and non-political or apolitical violence. Violence used by armed resistance groups (guer­rilla and terrorist groups) is inevitably political in its aims and motives. That is why it is called political violence. Criminals and pathological murders also use violence but their aims and motives are different. Criminal groups use violence to obtain money or to acquire material goods. Pathological murders see violence as an end in itself. Usually they are not interested in politics, profit or material goods.The main idea of this article is that, because of the numerous recent researches made in the field of political violence (insurgency, terrorism, and guerrilla warfare), different strategies of armed resistance may be more or less clearly defined. Guerrilla warfare and terrorism are different strategies or different strategic approaches used by various non-state actors. The author argues that guerrillas and terrorists should be distinguished according to four criteria: 1) targets; 2) identification signs; 3) control of territory; 4) size of operational units. Terrorists’ targets are mostly civilian ones. Guerrillas’ targets are mostly military. Terrorists do not use uniforms or other signs to identify them as combatants. Guerrillas usually have some sort of identification signs. Terrorists are not interested in control of the territory. Guerrillas want to seize or hold on territory. Terrorists usually operate in units ranging from lone assassin to five-member teams. Guerrillas mostly wage their war in platoon or company size units.The distinction between terrorism and guerrilla warfare is of crucial importance because it helps to better understand the nature of armed resistance. It should be pointed out that on the understanding and clear definitions of terrorism and guerrilla warfare depends the quality of an academic research. In addition, the distinction of guerrilla warfare and terrorism is important for the success of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns.

Superpower Agency and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War

One of the key challenges for scholars studying U.S. and Soviet power in the Third World has been to account for the agency of non-Western actors. In episodes ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan, the Americans and Soviets found themselves hamstrung in small wars, fighting seemingly inferior opponents that were nevertheless able to block or at least complicate superpower ambitions. How much agency should historians assign to Third World actors, small states, and nonstate groups? It might be argued that during the Cold War, local players made their own history, but they did not always do so under circumstances of their choosing; rather, they did it under circumstances and structures created by the superpowers. By connecting the superpower politics of détente to the local dynamics of the Arab–Israeli conflict, Craig Daigle’s book offers a bold defense of superpower agency. The book focuses on the origins of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, casting the regional story through the lens of the Cold War. Daigle’s core argument is that superpower détente helped to set the stage for war between Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The war was thus a “consequence of détente” (p. 331). During the same time that superpower rapprochement sought to reduce tensions between Moscow and Washington, Daigle explains, it threatened to freeze a fundamentally unacceptable status quo in the Middle East, leaving leaders in Cairo and Damascus with no other recourse than to go to war against Israeli military forces occupying Egyptian and Syrian territory. Cold War détente helped to produce an untenable stalemate in Egyptian–Israeli relations. Daigle’s time in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State is on display throughout. The author has mined the American archives to produce the best-documented account of U.S. policy toward the Egyptian–Israeli rivalry in the immediate run-up to the 1973 war.

Navigating Complex Identities of Victim-Perpetrators in Reparation Mechanisms

Reparations over the past few decades have become integral in responding to mass victimisation and conflict in international law and transitional justice. Although the development of reparations in transitional justice has been framed around abusive authoritarian regimes and repairing the harm suffered by civilians, such as in Latin America, there has been contentious reparation rulings by regional human rights courts in situations of internal armed conflict by recognising perpetrators and 'terrorists' as victims and awarding them reparations. Complex identities are particularly acute in situations of internal armed conflict, where protracted internal violence between the state and organised non-state groups, due to the political narratives in legitimatising the violence and victimisation of each 'side'. This paper examines the construction of complex identities in reparation mechanisms and the context of recognising victims and perpetrators in transitional justice processes. This paper explores the approach to these issues in a number of contexts to discern a way forward in traversing the complex landscape of reparations for victim-perpetrators. The paper tries to reconcile the more subjective state perspective and political limits of transitional justice, to the objective stance of international fora and obligations on states to provide to reparations to a wider class of victims.