Political Theory of Armed Groups: Social Order and Armed Groups [1st ed.] 9783030510114, 9783030510121

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Andrei Miroiu

Political Theory of Armed Groups Social Order and Armed Groups 1 23

SpringerBriefs in Political Science

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8871

Andrei Miroiu

Political Theory of Armed Groups Social Order and Armed Groups

Andrei Miroiu Research Institute of the University of Bucharest University of Bucharest Bucharest, Romania

ISSN 2191-5466     ISSN 2191-5474 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Political Science ISBN 978-3-030-51011-4    ISBN 978-3-030-51012-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51012-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Like all works, this too owes a lot to many people. I want to thank the people of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest for providing me with the time and money to dedicate my efforts to this work. Special thanks in this regard go to not only Marian Zulean but also Dragosˏ, Aligică and Jeffrey Isaac. Many people read or heard parts of this work and contributed suggestions and good advice. In particular, thanks go to the members of the Sydney-based Non-State Actors Research Group, the Bucharest-based Group of Advanced Studies in International Relations, and members of the Comenius University Department of Political Science. Early parts of this work have been read by or inspired by conversations with Andrew Tan, Padraic Kenney, Ben Eklof, and Peter Layton. The writings of Daniel Biro, as well as his constant friendship have been great sources of inspiration for this book. Many thanks also go to my parents Mihaela and Adrian. Their help is hard to quantify. The team at Springer also deserves all my thanks, from believing in the project to actually seeing it done and being made available to the readers. Gratitude above all is due to Raluca Alecu. Her enthusiasm for the project and manuscript is what motivated me to go on and so many of the arguments have been made much better by her sharpness, wit, and tireless dedication. She is this work more than she imagines.

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Contents

1 Theorizing Armed Groups������������������������������������������������������������������������   1 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    9 2 Historical Aspects of Armed Groups��������������������������������������������������������  11 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  25 3 Beyond the State: Armed Groups and Social Order������������������������������  29 3.1 Exploitative Groups����������������������������������������������������������������������������  30 3.1.1 Organisation����������������������������������������������������������������������������  31 3.1.2 Operations ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  33 3.1.3 Economic Exploitative Groups and Social Order ������������������  35 3.2 Political/Ideological Groups ��������������������������������������������������������������  38 3.2.1 Organization����������������������������������������������������������������������������  40 3.2.2 Operations ������������������������������������������������������������������������������  43 3.2.3 Political-Ideological Armed Groups and Social Order ����������  46 References����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  50 4 Conclusions������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  55

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Chapter 1

Theorizing Armed Groups

Abstract  The following pages set armed groups at the centre of political theory. De-centering the state is set as a fundamental goal for moving theory towards a broader understanding of politics and society. This is accomplished by arguing that armed groups are the key actors responsible for the formation, maintaining and contestation of social order in settled and complex human communities. While classes, genders, races, laws, social mores, economic mechanisms and cultural models are important for understanding how specific, individual social orders work, armed groups operate at the fundamental level of order creation. Further, a classification of armed groups is proposed, firstly dividing armed groups between permanent and impermanent and secondly between political-ideological groups and economic exploitative groups. Keywords  Political theory · State · Anarchism · Social order · Armed groups

The following work aims to treat the reader to a new perspective on armed groups coming from political theory. It sets itself a difficult task. Centuries of political reflection engaged with the formation of political communities, with power relations amongst them and more generally with social order, generally understood here as the relatively peaceful, norms guaranteed stability in which predictable social interactions can take place. Yet those same centuries have provided rather sketchy if not altogether distorted perspectives on those who create, perpetuate and overthrow social order or are able to create overlapping social orders. The pages that follow will argue, against this substantial consensus, that armed groups (AGs) are in fact the social and political actors responsible for creating and maintaining social order. Laws, contracts, constitutions, organized religion all follow the establishment of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Miroiu, Political Theory of Armed Groups, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51012-1_1

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social order. Classes, races and genders appear later as political actors.1 They do not create social order, at most they justify it or segments of it. By themselves, they are not enough to protect it or to overthrow it. They also speak very little about overlapping social orders within a given society. The AGs, however, can and in fact do all that. I propose in the following pages that the distinction made in social sciences between armed groups operating under the aegis of the governments and those that do not is unnecessary. Functionally, they serve the same purpose, which is the establishment, defence and sometimes contestation of a given social order in order to replace it with another, fragmentary or not. From this perspective, there is little difference between armies, police forces, rebel and terrorist groups, pirates or any other “organised crime” armed groups. Certainly, this is a controversial perspective, particularly for those social theorists who still wear the “lenses of the state”. Such scholars, who have not yet broken free from the intellectual shackles of “natural law”, “social contract” or the statist persuasions of political theology, fetishise the state as something more than just one possible version and instance of a stable social order. Yet if those lenses are removed and the state ceases to be seen in teleological terms, a whole different perspective is open for the investigation of power structure and society. There is no claim here that the entirety of this approach is new. Indeed, it stayed for centuries as the default position of anarchist writers. However, only in the last few decades, through the works of Sahlins, Clastres, Illich, Scott, Gelderloos and others, anarchism moved from just a political position towards a serious investigative perspective in social sciences (Clastres, 2011; Gelderloos, 2017; Illich, 1971; Sahlins, 2017; Scott, 2010). This work is based at its core on the breakthroughs made by authors such as these. In methodological terms, it unabashedly vindicates itself from Paul Feyerabend. While comparative historical political science could be said to be its main tool, I see the following work as eclectic from a methodological perspective (Feyerabend, 1993). It blends political theory, history, strategic studies and anthropology in what I hope to be the coherent perspective necessary for a deeper understanding of armed groups and their relation with social order. Firstly however, one needs to reflect upon the reasons why AGs have not been so far the concerted focus of research in political theory. In other words, why were AGs relegated to minor roles, usually in military sociology and law enforcement studies with little connection with grand political theory? Most importantly, why were they not recognised as a unitary theoretical object, worthy of investigation per se? It would be easy to speculate upon some answers, but a few present themselves almost naturally. Firstly, political theory as a whole was historically formulated within the confines of existing patterns of authority and legitimacy. Political theorists only ever speculate upon “the state of nature”, they seldom if ever experienced it. Further, political theory tends to shy away from objects and concepts which are inherently difficult to characterise. Virtually everyone living in settled societies

 I would especially like to thank Raluca Alecu for suggesting this formulation.

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deals with issues such as legitimacy and authority at some point in their lives. In most cases, legitimacy and authority come from long established patterns, ingrained in the functioning of society and defining it to a certain point. The same individual, in all but the most remote conditions and communities, will have direct or mediated experience with AGs. They will see police patrols, perhaps parades of the armed forces. They will hear of the existence of intelligence services. They might experience but definitely hear about groups of people in conflict with the state and segments of the established order, be they labelled revolutionaries or bandits. But, while the authority of the schoolmaster and the legitimacy of town hall’s edicts are monotonous, repetitive, clearly identifiable in pattern, manifestation and source and thus easy to classify, the same cannot be said of the AGs most persons experience in the course of their lives. If one looks at their immediate, declared purpose, AGs seem to be different objects of enquiry. Police forces guarantee order, enforce the sovereign power’s monopoly on the means of “legitimate” violence and apprehend villains. Armed forces defeat strong, organised enemies of the state from outside and inside the borders, however defined. Intelligence services work at apprehending cunning enemies of the state. Revolutionary AGs want to overthrow governments for political purposes or detach pieces of territory from their control. Organised crime wants to control physical or social territory in order to continue making money from activities the state labels as illegal. It is easy to understand all these as different types of activities requiring distinct approaches. For some of these groups, such as organised crime groups, it is also easy to see why political theory showed almost no interest in them, if we discount the debates concerning Hobsbawm’s concept of “social bandits” (Hobsbawm, 1969). One should also take into consideration a few aspects that have more to do with the history and work habits of political theory than with the subject per se. Debates concerning the sources of social order seem either to have been settled, with different schools of thought hanging tightly to their own interpretations, or to have been relegated to a backroom few scholars ever venture in. Statists of a “Whig persuasion” tend to see order as proceeding smoothly through a “liberalisation of the Leviathan”, with Athenian democracy challenging early on the Oriental despotism and eventually leading, after many twists and turns, to contemporary liberal democracies (Butterfield, 1965; Fukuyama, 2011, p. 15). Their nationalist or “populist” adversaries, while they differ about the internal purposes of the state, generally accept the main narrative concerning the state as unique guarantor of social order. While Marxist theorists seem to be interested in social order in pre-historical societies, their focus and interests have more to do with social and economic disparities resulting from the social division of labor (Engels, 2010). Class division and coherent, organised religion demand very soon the establishment of the power and authority of the state. From then on, the narrative of Marxist theorists concerning social order within the state differs from the liberal interpretation of historical progress only by identifying the true seat of power in the structural position of the ruling class (Anderson, 2013). Marxist political theory is indeed subtler in the way in which it also focuses on micro-levels of social order; but it does so only by transfer, replacing the feudal class/society-at-large dyad with the landlord/peasant dyad for

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the local level. Feminist historiography of social order is virtually indistinguishable in its pattern of argumentation from the Marxist’, while being more innovative in focusing on gender oppression at family level, a unit of analysis neglected by Marxist and liberal political theorists at their own peril (Scott, 1986). Other scholars who attempted to treat AGs as coherent subjects of investigation have done so from the angle of international relations’ neorealist theory. In it, AGs were seen as autonomous actors existing, like states, in conditions of anarchy, whose motivations have less to do with greed or grievance and more with survival, best secured through the accumulation of power (Vinci, 2008, pp. 10–11). Though certainly important, this structural realist perspective fails to see the essential functional identity between state and non-state AGs and, of course, is only useful in a world dominated by sovereign actors. The following investigation, seeking to dethrone the state as the main referent of political theory, sees AGs in a substantially wider sense. Fundamentally though, political theories start most of their reflections on social order at a chronologically later point than the one from which this investigation begins. Why do we have order rather than chaos among human communities, even those stateless societies still in existence? The oppression of the state, religion, laws, economic patterns and social mores is a latter phenomenon than the establishment of order, or as some statist scholars would put it, as human communities grow, “order is necessary for managing violence as much as the threat of violence is crucial in cementing order” (Kalyvas, Shapiro, & Masoud, 2008, p.  1). Perhaps the dominance of the male in the household happens earlier (when it happens, if at all), but it only speaks for intra-familial dynamics rather than the functioning of society. I argue here that for most communities and human polities, except some hunter-­ gatherer groups, order is established by the violence or the credible threats of using violence by groups of armed humans. These groups can be large or small, permanent or (initially) impermanent. They can possess the most sophisticated weaponry or nothing more basic than sticks and stones. They need to be groups because the strongest individuals can be defeated by the weakest member of the community or any association dedicated to this purpose. They need to be armed because of the intimidating effect as well as for the efficacy of the weapons, broadly intimating that violence could be meted on others with little to no physical consequences to the members of the group. Their reasons for establishing order can only be speculated upon. Someone coming from the fields of rational choice or economics would argue that it is the expected choice under conditions of uncertainty. Others would seek its origin through concepts such as animus dominandi. Yet others would see it as a necessary and more stable move once the communities become large enough to become unstable under the guidance of traditional patterns of social interaction. However, the fact that these groups do appear and they do establish order is indisputable and for the purposes of political theory the reasons for doing that are somewhat secondary. The reasons why AGs continue to maintain their operations would, however, be considered in the following chapters.

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The following pages present a classification of AGs, seeking a better understanding of their functioning but also aiming to place them in a more comprehensive role in political theory.2 While social complexity increases with demographic growth, economic expansion and the continuous creation of social norms, some basic functions of society remain the same. As armed groups tend to cater to particular, old and somehow perennial social functions, it is not eminently necessary to classify them by historical period, although it might seem tempting. This temptation needs however to give way to the understanding that patterns of order transcend technological or legal changes, as well as transformations due to the social construction of new social norms and habits. Indeed, certain types of non-state armed groups may seem to be specific to particular historical periods and in a sense to be entirely contained by them. One could look for instance at the military orders during the time of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (and before the Order of the Hospital became its own near-state in Rhodes at the beginning of the fourteenth century). It would appear that they took specific forms and a unique outlook based on the local and temporal conditions. But this would be to succumb to ritual, attire and taking a bit too seriously medieval institutional regulations and relations with the pope or the local suzerain. In essence the military orders were fulfilling two roles many other armed groups did and still do: they offered an additional military force to the existing lay forces of the Kingdom and other Latin states of the Outremer, and also provided private military protection to pilgrims visiting the Holy Sites (Riley-Smith, 2015; Tyerman, 2006). Not one of these roles is specific or historically contained. Contemporary private military companies, for instance, do similar things. The Wagner Group has performed such services in the 2010s in countries as disparate as Nigeria, Syria, Ukraine and the Central African Republic (Marten, 2019). AGs operate at the elementary level of power—that of coercing someone’s will by force or the threat of violence. While they may acquire other roles, in many cases related to the provision of social services, they are not part of their essence. A militant group can provide food and medicine to a beleaguered community. So can a government, a humanitarian foundation, a businessman or an international aid organization. An armed group may instill loyalty, create preferred behavioral patterns and influence folklore (Hobsbawm, 1971). So can a football club. While the additional roles an armed group takes, or has them thrown upon itself are interesting and could make the bread and butter of anyone working for or on them, they are not a defining characteristic for the AGs and, therefore, cannot help in their classification. AGs exist before the state, simultaneously with it, both outside and inside the state or indifferent to the state altogether. They can assume various positions in relation to the state: organs of the state such as the army, police, paramilitary units of

2  The following paragraphs are to a very large degree a reiteration of arguments made in (Miroiu, 2019).

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secret services; gangster groups which operate inside a state but in no particular relation to it; local militias regulating local affairs (Underwood, 2009). While the relation with the state and especially governments leads us closer to a more thorough understanding of armed groups, particularly in more recent times, by itself it is not a intrinsic characteristic of AGs and cannot be used for a systematic classification of them. One needs to insist on this point, as it has confused scholars for decades: there is no functional need and therefore no theoretical need to introduce a separation between state and non-state AGs (Miroiu & Ungureanu, 2015). Once one de-centers the state from political theory, the previous thesis becomes evident and, indeed, banal. The defining characteristic of an armed group is its ability to use and threaten the use of armed, decisive violence against its opponents. It follows therein that there are two ways in which a classification of armed groups can be done at a consistent and fundamental level. The first involves the sustainability of this threat and use of violence, and the second would be the purpose for which violence is threatened or used. The first criterion may seem somehow fleeting, but is very important: an armed group can be a permanent or impermanent social gathering. This feature needs to be understood in the following way: it does not refer to the permanence of the carrying and use of weapons, but rather to the permanence of the gathering as an armed group. For instance, the fact that a “gangster” group can refrain for a significant period of time from the use and threat of violence and even from the carrying of weapons does not mean that during such a period it is not an armed group, much like an army is no less of an armed group in the extended periods of peace. As their social purpose is permanent, “organized crime” groups remain AGs even in such instances. Other social gatherings, for instance, can be temporary armed groups, such as local defence militias that are activated in case of need. They are AGs only for the duration of the emergency. They do not possess enough individuality outside the emergency, their social purpose is limited temporally and functionally. The same can be said, with varying degrees of reliability, for the defensive or offensive structures of pre-state sedentary communities: their armed groups were more or less impermanent. Even war bands can be said to be temporary AGs, even if all the members stayed the same from one warpath to another. In this, they differ from the type of armed groups that generate order in states, in the sense that they do generate order but are impermanent. The police have to continually be on the streets to maintain order. A war band does not. In this, they are closer to the type of order maintained by a “gangster” group, with the provision that gangster groups are permanent armed groups whereas most war bands are not. The second criterion divides AGs by the purpose for which violence or the threat of violence is used. It has to be said from the beginning that the classification deriving from this feature cannot be taken as dividing armed groups into rigid categories. Indeed, for some these uses may be overlapping and it would be difficult to place some groups in any specific category. Furthermore, at certain points in their existence, certain historic AGs have jumped from one category into another or had to juggle many of them simultaneously. Certain “criminal” armed groups can be taken

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to be purely economic structures. But they can also be seen as cultural, identity-­ based gatherings defending a certain type of honour or traditions of an ethnic minority perceived to be slighted by an indifferent government and a racist majority. Guerrilla groups, which can be thought of as either sovereignty or legitimacy contestants, have sometimes shifted to purely economic activities, in order to finance their political action; at other times they turned into gangster empires. In other cases, they have been more active as social controllers in enforcing certain social norms that the government is too soft on, such as those regulating drug trafficking, or does not consider illegal, such as sexual practices. But this ambiguity should not dissuade us from considering the purpose of the use and threat of violence as a defining criterion for the classification of AGs (Schneckener, 2009). There are three types of reasons for the use of violence by “political” armed groups. Before one moves to them, one should remind the reader that in general, the term “political” should not be applied without a certain apprehension. AGs are operational units at such a basic level that they precede politics in chronological terms. They also transcend politics understood as a peaceful activity, through their centrality in war. Armed groups form conditions for peace and ingredients for war. War, or violent conflict, is the norm of interaction, and peace is always just an armed truce. Firstly, the main type of “political” AGs could be seen to include those using violence to guarantee stability. They are the armed groups of the state or, in some instances, those that are the state. They encompass in many instances the army, police, state militias and paramilitaries (such as the party militias of a ruling political party or the armed components of the secret services). Secondly, an armed group uses violence to contest the ability or rights of one particular elite to rule one said state or community. In this case, the AG does not contest the existence of the community as such, perhaps not even most of its fundamental rules, though this interferes in some cases with the first of the major reasons for the use of violence, explained in the following paragraphs (Wilkinson, 2015). The armed group substantially requires just the modification of some of the ruling group’s policies or, at most, the replacement of some individuals and governmental rules with individuals and rules agreed by the group. Here we can sum up this case as involving legitimacy-contestants. Many civil wars, skirmishes and acts of political terrorism fall in this category. To a certain extent, most dynastic contests, the civil wars of Ancient Rome, the seventeenth century Fronde and even some modern revolutions belong to it (Goubert, 2014; Syme, 2002). Thirdly, an armed group uses violence to contest the control of a ruling group over a particular stretch of territory. Though they can again be revolutionary in nature and can act from inside or outside of the political boundaries of a community, the AGs in this case have as a fundamental goal to detach a piece of territory from a given political community, either aiming to rule it independently or to glue it to another, pre-existing, political body. Here we are talking about sovereignty-­ contestants. Many ethnic militias, anti-colonial fighters and other pro-independence movements fall in this category, but so did the American confederates in the 1860s or the Austrian fascists of the late 1930s.

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To sum up, the above types of AGs could be labelled as ideological/religious. The armed groups of this type uphold or challenge the rules of repartition (mostly of power and/or resources) and the rules of behavior in a community. It is an interesting observation here that class, gender or race-based conflicts and groups belong to both types of rules-contestation. The duality of definition is, of course, contestable. Why indeed add the “religious” as a distinct category or sub-category? At their core, the groups operating with these reasons are doing the exact same thing, which is the contestation of the fundamental social, economic and ethical rules on which a particular community is based, and seeking to replace them with an alternative code that the groups consider correct or more appropriate to their normative structures. So, functionally the two types are largely indistinct. The sole difference is to be found in the source from which these groups derive their beliefs. The religious groups extract theirs from a particular understanding or communication with a trans-natural being or sets of beings, whereas the others, commonly called “ideological” with a late eighteenth century term, are deriving their beliefs from supposedly rational or ethically-coherent social and political views. As behaviorally and to a large extent ontologically the two types of intellectual legitimation of violence are largely indistinct, the sole reasons I keep the duality of the division (ideological/religious) are historical and to allow those working on particular armed groups to create more detailed sub-categories. Again, the types themselves of AGs are of no concern here; it is somehow inconsequential for the purposes of the theory sketched in these pages if we can assert that one particular group is a member of one specific category. One aspect that has been mentioned before needs to be better understood here. The ideological/religious groups often overlap the political-contestant groups. While indeed in some cases, particularly of dynastic or tribal conflict, the political-­ contestant groups are distinct and their motivations for the use of violence are separate, in most other cases they are just subgroups of the ideological/religious divide. Even militant independence movements are most of the time dominated not by the sovereignty-contestant impulse, which is just an action-trigger, but by larger nationalist or confessional-based convictions. Therefore, it is to be understood that the political-contestation criterion is seldom independent and its use in classification needs to be treated carefully, always considering the possibility of the pre-eminence of the ideological/religious impulse. The second major reason for the use or threat of violence by AGs is squarely economical. The economic criterion is fundamentally about the extraction of resources and their redistribution (which is to be understood as extraction from producers/owners followed by redistribution to the members of the groups or to other communities) and therefore about exploitation. The main division that needs to be discussed here is between external and internal economically motivated armed groups. The external groups operate from beyond the established and perhaps recognised boundaries of one political community. The groups that tend to fall in this category are raiding parties and warlords, of which the Native American groups of old operating against each other or against White colonists as well as the Germanic tribes operating against the northern limes of the

References

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Roman Empire in the second and third centuries of the Christian Era are good examples, though contemporary Africa can boast of many similar examples, for instance, in the large region that used to be known in toto as the Sudan (Heather, 2010; Leonardi, 2007). External economic groups can engage in three types of permanent economic exploitation. First would be a permanent exploitation in which a raiding party transforms itself into a ruling group, thus transitioning from external to internal economic armed group. Secondly, there is the classical permanence of economic exploitation without a permanent presence of the armed group, best exemplified by raids and the regular demand of tribute. Thirdly, the extraction of economic resources is definitive, at which point an external AG obliterates the target-community (Darwin, 2008). Once this classification is accepted, I will refer to the AGs through the second criterion as political-ideologically driven AGs and economic exploitative AGs. These terms will be used consistently in the following two chapters, dedicated to a deeper understanding of the theoretical tenets outlined before. The second chapter deals in more detail with the historical genesis of AGs and their relation with social order, with more attention paid to those groups operating under the aegis of governments. The third chapter deals extensively with the relation between armed groups and social order, with a focus on both political-ideologically driven and economic exploitative AGs.

References Anderson, P. (2013). Passages from antiquity to feudalism. London: Verso Books. Butterfield, H. (1965). The Whig interpretation of history. New York: WW Norton. Clastres, P. (2011). La société contre l'Etat. Barcelona: Minuit. Darwin, J. (2008). After Tamerlane: The rise and fall of global empires, 1400–2000. London: Penguin. Engels, F. (2010). The origin of the family, private property and the state. London: Penguin. Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against method. London: Verso. Fukuyama, F. (2011). The origins of political order: From prehuman times to the French revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gelderloos, P. (2017). Worshiping power. La Vergne: AK Press. Goubert, P. (2014). Mazarin. Paris: Fayard. Heather, P. (2010). Empires and barbarians: migration, development and the birth of Europe. Pan Macmillan. Hobsbawm, E. (1969). Bandits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1971). Primitive rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. London: Harper and Row. Kalyvas, S.  N., Shapiro, I., & Masoud, T.  E. (Eds.). (2008). Order, conflict, and violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leonardi, C. (2007). Violence, sacrifice and chiefship in central Equatoria, southern Sudan. Africa, 77(4), 535–558. Marten, K. (2019). Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The case of the Wagner group. Post-­ Soviet Affairs, 35(3), 181–204.

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Miroiu, A. (2019). Armed groups: Theory and classification. Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 63(6), 84–92. Miroiu, A., & Ungureanu, R.  S. (2015). Armed non-state actors as a distinct research topic. International Review of Social Research, 5(3), 153–155. Riley-Smith, J. (2015). Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus. London: Springer. Sahlins, M. (2017). Stone age economics. New York: Taylor & Francis. Schneckener, U. (2009). Spoilers or governance actors?: Engaging armed non-state groups in areas of limited statehood. SBF-Governance Working Paper Series No. 21. Scott, J. C. (2010). The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Singapore: NUS Press. Scott, J.  W. (1986). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. The American Historical Review, 91(5), 1053–1075. Syme, R. (2002). The Roman revolution. London: Oxford University. Tyerman, C. (2006). God’s war: A new history of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Underwood, P. T. (2009). Pirates, vikings, and teutonic knights. In J. Norwitz (Ed.), Pirates, terrorists, and warlords: The history, influence, and future of armed groups around the world. New York: Skyhorse. Vinci, A. (2008). Armed groups and the balance of power: The international relations of terrorists, warlords and insurgents. New York: Routledge. Wilkinson, M. (2015). Negotiating with the other: centre-periphery perceptions, peacemaking policies and pervasive conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. International Review of Social Research, 5(3), 179–190.

Chapter 2

Historical Aspects of Armed Groups

Abstract  In this chapter armed groups are set against a historical background. It starts with the earliest attempts at organizing complex human communities and continues towards highly stratified contemporary societies, with their multiplicities of armed groups, some serving central governments while others oppose it or try to circumvent it. The following pages comprise a discussion of the origin and evolution of armed groups nowadays known as armies, police forces, militias, intelligence services and other armed organisations of central government. Vigilantes and disorganized or impermanent armed groups are also discussed. Keywords  Armed groups · State · Anthropology · Political theory · Army · Police · Vigilantes

The following pages discuss armed groups in their historical context. Questions regarding their genesis, position inside earlier and modern societies are raised here, with an emphasis on their relations with the issue of social order. Closer attention is paid to those armed groups that have a link with state formation and state functioning, in an attempt to review and perhaps amend political theory in regards to the structures of order formation and maintaining order. Armies and proto-armies, police forces, intelligence agencies, vigilante groups and mercenaries are considered from this perspective. While groups functioning against, outside and beyond the state, such as rebels, insurrectionists or the “organised crime” are also mentioned, they occupy less space as the next chapter is entirely dedicated to them. Armed groups permeate known history and are sufficiently present in archaeological and anthropological records to allow us to think that they are perennial features of organised human existence (Gat, 2008). Moreover, from very early iterations of large human organisations one can find that these structures tend to encompass or accommodate not one or two, but instead a multiplicity of AGs.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Miroiu, Political Theory of Armed Groups, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51012-1_2

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Complex contemporary societies feature a multitude of overlapping AGs of different types, but all somehow connected with the problem of order. Let us reflect for instance at the current position of the United States. On a local level, legal order is guaranteed by police forces, sometimes operating under different authorities and creating the misconception that some of their components (militarised police, SWAT teams) could be distinct AGs. On the state level, there is of course the National Guard and its numerous components. At the federal level one finds the military forces of the United States with their six main branches (the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Space Force), but also AGs subordinated to authorities such as the ATF, CIA or the FBI, which in some cases boast field offices with local branches of aforementioned AGs. Certainly, one can point to the fact that the ATF, CIA or FBI are more complex bureaucratic organisations of the government. But all of them nevertheless operate armed groups within their structure, so they can be included in the previous enumeration. Yet if we chose to move outside of groups operating under the authority of the state, more AGs become visible. La Cosa Nostra is a structure operating AGs almost a century after being organised as a national-level crime syndicate (Raab, 2016). African-American, Mexican, Ukrainian, Albanian groups dominate neighborhoods of US towns and cities and coordinate in many areas drug and prostitution related activities. Certain outlaw motorcycle groups with varying degrees of involvement in organised crime can also be thought of as AGs (Lauchs, Bain, & Bell, 2015). International crime groups such as Mexican or Colombian cartels similarly had or still constitute AGs inside US borders. In remote or not so remote areas of the country volunteer militias, more or less related to white supremacists, still exist (Belew, 2019). In a not quite a remote past ad-hoc vigilante groups have operated in certain communities. Ideologically-motivated movements, domestic or foreign, have at times constituted AGs for local or national-level action, perpetrating acts that governments tend to label as terrorist. One needs only to remember the Ku Klux Klan, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers or Al Qaeda (Patterson, 1996; Ramakrishna, 2002). A critic would say that the sheer vastness of the USA combined with the relaxed, constitutionally protected policy on gun ownership contributes to the existence of a multiplicity of AGs in this country. However, a look at countries with extremely restrictive gun ownership policies dissuades us of such notion. The Soviet Union, for instance, boasting itself a good number of state-controlled AGs (the Red Army, the troops of the ministry of the interior including the border guards, the troops of the KGB as well as local police forces known as Militia) confronted for decades armed groups of the organised crime or anti-communist partisan groups, in action in Ukraine or the Baltic countries well into the 1950s (Galeotti, 2018; Statiev, 2010; Zhukov, 2007). Relatively small countries such as Nicaragua feature or featured at times the AGs of the state, various rebel movements as well as gang activity (Rodgers, 2006). In fact, it is probably not an overstatement to say that countries with only state-connected AGs are the exception rather than the rule. Another possible criticism towards the use of contemporary US as an example concerning the large number of overlapping or parallel AGs could be that complex

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societies create the social need for substantial numbers of state or non-state AGs cooperating or competing over different sectors of social order. Yet a look into the past, which is the main purpose of this chapter, would prove otherwise. If one were to think of the medieval kingdom of France around the year 1300 one would find again a substantial number of AGs operating within the geographically ambiguous and legally unclear borders of this polity (Bloch, 1968). In place of contemporary armies, one finds the royal troops recruited from the royal domains, as well as mercenaries paid from the treasury. The army could at times be supplemented by the levies of the feudal lords subjected to the king of France, but only for limited periods of time and generally only when powerful lords were in general alignment with the policies of the king. Otherwise they constituted separate, almost private AGs, guaranteeing social order in their respective territories (Contamine, 1980). Cities in the kingdom had their own, municipal police forces. Groups deemed as criminal, such as bandits or pirates, roamed the countryside, the coastlines or the underbelly of the cities. And in addition to all that, organisations such as the Knights Templar, nominally under the control of a different power centre, the Papacy, operated their own AGs (Forey, 1992; Housley, 1992). How do AGs connect with the historical record? Is there enough basis behind the idea that they are endemic to organised society? The answer to this question, while an obvious yes, becomes more interesting as we go deeper into the past and as we use the previously outlined classification of AGs. By far the thorniest issue under our scrutiny is the existence and relevance of armed groups within the earliest human communities (and here it is especially relevant the fact that we are employing the term “community” rather than society, the second being laden with a sense of impersonal communication and shared abstract constructs that is unknown in face-to-face, tightly-knit communities). The archaeological record is still debated between schools of thought advocating for a relatively peaceful state of nature and those arguing in favour of the existence of organised warfare from the earliest times (Gat, 2008). While extremes obviously still exist in either of these sides, harkening back to models first proposed by Hobbes or Rousseau, research based both on archaeological finds and the study of present-day “stone age” communities highlights the existence of inter-tribal warfare. Hence, the existence of probably impermanent AGs dedicated to the defence of an orderly existence of kin-based human communities is not seriously in doubt (Harari, 2014). What is far more difficult is to argue in favour of the existence of very small AGs protecting order inside such early communities. There is little doubt that many hunter-gatherer or even small pastoralist or crop-grower agriculturalists in places such as the Amazon, Central Africa or Papua had or still have a substantial warrior culture (Bodley, 2011; Lecca, 1972). This culture could be said to be so ingrained in the “evolution” (for lack of a better word) of human communities that part of the cultural behaviour of males in the Southern part of the United States could be explained as gentlemanly/warrior culture (Cohen & Vandello, 1998; Kernan, 1906). Whether this culture deals entirely with foreign threats and is in any way applicable to groups of people controlling or regulating small communities is a matter of speculation.

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Most ethnographers have not been inclined to study violence inside small communities, preferring to focus either on inter-tribal warfare, individual violence on matters such as infidelity or honour protection, or simply succumbing to the idea of the “peaceful savage” so that they may have been inclined to overlook arguments to the contrary. Indeed, one can identify here a weakness and a bias inside anarchist political theory. So much depends for anarchist prescriptions on denying the existence of authoritarian arrangements inside early communities (and, similarly, on denying the existence of violence in said human groups) that ethnographers so inclined may have overlooked coercive powers of tribal chiefs and their underlings. A good case in point is that of anthropological arguments concerning the relatively late, colonial times introduction of chieftainship in parts of Africa of Oceania (Leonardi, 2007). While the idea holds water, there simply has not been enough research to know whether these structures were completely new and not introduced over possibly already existing patterns of authoritarianism. While almost-leaderless societies certainly existed, with authority based almost entirely on consent (at least that of the male members) rather than coercion, this may obscure the fact that not all early human communities had this feature (Cook, 1821). In short, it is rather difficult to make the case for AGs protecting internal order in almost every early human community, but their existence in some of them is also hard to discount completely. If the issue of “internal order centered AGs” is more complicated, the anthropological and archaeological record support the idea that almost all known human communities boasted AGs dedicated to external raiding and warfare, an endeavour in which even the substantially peaceful Australian Aborigines certainly took part (Danielsson, 1956; Mountford, 1950). There is little point in rehashing here the dispute concerning whether “primitive” warfare was ritualistic or not or to what degree. People died and were injured in armed tribal conflicts, captives were taken and held in different types of bondage by armed violence and threats of violence, farm animals and food were pillaged and permanent settlements destroyed (Clastres, 2011). All this was accomplished by war bands, the earliest AGs whose existence is certain. In their essence, these war bands are the forefathers of a number of distinct AGs existing until the present day. Most obviously, they are the genitors of armies, but also of permanent or impermanent external exploitative AGs, such as external raiders, rovers, pirates and marauders. One should make clear the argument that these community armed groups are dealing with social order even if they are in no way connected with projecting violence inside their own borders. For order to be preserved, peace must be both internal and external. Therefore, these AGs are maintaining order by preventing attacks on their community. Further, aggressive actions of these AGs against other communities can also be interpreted to defend a specific order of their own community. AGs are not necessarily dedicated to inter-group (or, thinking of today), international order. To such a lofty purpose they can be set by governments, but it is not in their nature. Order for a certain community can most certainly mean warfare with other communities. Let us think of a few examples. The Apaches, spreading in an area that today stretches the southeastern United States and northeastern Mexico, were an ordered society that depended on raids procuring horses and people from

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neighbouring communities, be they other Native American tribes, Mexicans or Texans. Without warfare and the resulting spoils or tribute, the internal functioning of the Apache society would have been greatly affected (Watt, 2002). In Northern Africa, the Barbary states of Alger or Tunis were completely dependent on raiding the Christian shores of the Western or Northern Mediterranean, with some of their depredations affecting lands as far away as Ireland and even Iceland in order to subsist as functioning societies, a state of affairs that only ended with the destruction of these states through European occupation (Murphy, 2013). In the early decades of the twenty-first century, both internal order in the United States as well as the fragments of liberal international order defended by this power depended to a certain degree on the violence unleashed by different armed groups acting at the behest of the government in Washington against armed groups operating in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia (Burke, 2011; Mearsheimer, 2019). The hallmark of order is not peace, it is rather controlled violence and the threat of violence. While the word “army” is perhaps too pretentious to ascribe to all of these groups, an interesting point to debate would be the exact moment of emergence of those AGs that we can confidently call armies. Can there be armies without something we could call “the state”? In the sense in which an army is a large AG able to carry raids, stand its ground in battle and conquer a land or submit its inhabitants to the will of its leaders, the answer would be positive. Many raiding communities, from the Hittites to the Xiong Nu, could be said to possess armies without the state. Yet currently by armies we mostly understand the main military instrument of the state. Was the complex, impersonal system of social order called “the state” ever created without an AG at its fundament? One should emphasize at this point that the concept of “state” is used here in its basic, natural language sense. While Osiander’s theses on the relatively new establishment of entities we now know as states do hold water, his interpretation tends to complicate scholarly investigation for pre-modern times, in the sense in which we do not really need the whole accoutrements of modern state such as a national ideology, centralized government and the constant ability to raise taxes in order to keep using the concept for older polities (Osiander, 2001). While nowadays a few states do exist without the appearance of a solid AG protecting them (Iceland or Panama come to mind), they certainly subsist through the benevolence of other states, possessing substantial armed groups at their disposal. Iceland, for instance, is both a NATO member and the beneficiary of a 1951 defence agreement with the United States of America.1 Similarly, the Principality of Monaco’s defence needs have been assumed by France since 1918.2 In addition, all states do possess at least some form of AG guaranteeing internal order, if not necessarily external. But this observation, of course, tells us little about the genesis of the settled, impersonal, symbolic human community called “the state”. Both the

1  See Defense of Iceland: Agreement between the United States and the Republic of Iceland, May 5, 1951 at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ice001.asp. 2  See the text of the 1918 treaty at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/11/rap-info/i2311-2.asp.

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contractualist (Hobbes & Macpherson, 1968) and the anarchist/libertarian (Perlman, 1983) positions on the matter concur that the state emerged through the permanentisation of successful violence perpetrated by an AG within a given community and outside its borders. As De Jasay would put it, the inception of a state is linked with somebody being defeated (De Jasay, 1998, p. 16). Archaeological and historical records amply support this interpretation. While there might still be some lingering doubt about the intensity, if not the presence, of organised warfare in prehistorical communities, there is virtually no controversy concerning the link between warring and the genesis of the earliest states. To pick Charles Tilly’s famous phrase, it is probable that in all times the state made war, but it is virtually certain that war made the state an institution (Tilly, 1975). From Sumer to the Lower Nile, from the Indus to the Yellow River and from the jungles of Yucatan to the high peak of the Andes, whenever early states rose, it was on the back of conquest and of a large, successful AG (Doyle, 1986). States, virtually everywhere, tended to be created by leaders of AGs.3 And the only solid reason for this to be the case is the fact that a successful AG creates, recreates or upends a stable, coherent state of affairs that we chose to call social order. It is interesting to note here that certain communities that do possess large, successful AGs chose not to become states, or only did so by substituting themselves to authority groups in conquered societies that were already structured in state or state-­ like formats. The Araucanian tribes of South America successfully fought Spanish colonists for centuries, adapting to their tactics and technology as well as trading weapons with them. Yet they never decided to organise in a state-like structure, despite their control of substantial territory (De Armond, 1954). The same thing can be said about Native Americans on the territory of present-day United States, Mexico or Canada. While militarily successful, the Iroquois created at most a confederation of tribes. The powerful Sioux-Cheyenne combination, who ruled impressive swathes of land and lorded over other native tribes, never went that way either (Brands, 2019). And despite the eye-catching term “empire”, used by some historians in connection to the Comanche dominance of vast areas of today’s Texas, the substantially successful tribe never created a state (Hämäläinen, 2008). Communities that possessed AGs without turning into states for a long period of their existence include most of the “barbarian” adversaries of settled empires, be they Roman, Persian or Chinese. Some hesitated too long after successful campaigns and never created states though they certainly could have, such as the Huns. Others took the established path of substituting themselves to existing authorities once conquering a certain empire (the Mongols in China are but the best-known example). Yet some defeated or infiltrated with their AGs areas of empires and set up their ethnic kingdoms in conquered areas (Heather, 2010). This is the story of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths or of Ottoman Turks (Mantran, 1998). It is therefore, 3  One may make the case that a number of former colonies and newly independent states were not created by leaders of local AGs and the argument might stand true, but they had invariably been non-independent polities created by the imperial AGs. Furthermore, as soon as they became independent, they created, inherited or appropriated their own armed forces.

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not necessary for an AG to completely replace or remake social order in an entire polity. It is entirely feasible to reconstruct order on a defined piece of territory that has been occupied. As time would tell, this will be the path taken by many AGs in support of nationalist and liberation movements, or of those commanded by warlords seeking to create their own polities for exploitative purposes. Yet a category that is better understood is that of the AGs springing from a tribal structure (or certainly not a state-framework) that end up, through conquering foreign lands, in the position to create state or state-like structures. Polities in post-­1800s South Africa are good examples in this regard. The white Boers used armed violence to establish two republics, the Transvaal and the Orange state, on territory they took from the natives (Livingstone, 1872). The Zulus created in a little over a generation a powerful military instrument that turned a loose tribe into something that could almost pass as a state and proved more than a nuisance for the mightiest power on earth at the time, the United Kingdom (Gump, 2016). These examples and others would support the theory that the state is created through the action of AGs, but as previous segments showed, this is a possible, but not a necessary route. What happens with AGs as armies inside established polities? Do they submit entirely to the will and behest of the elites, even when their leadership does not coincide with the elite? One should perhaps note here that in virtually all polities, ancient or modern, the head of the state is at least formally also the head of the armed forces. This does not happen with other substantial positions within the state, as the head of the state is (or was) infrequently the head of the dominant religion, rarely the minister of finance and quite often not the minister of justice. In many cases, particularly in modern times, but also in Merovingian or seventeenth century France, the Shogunate period in Japan or through many periods of Ottoman Turkey, the head of state was not even the head of government. But in nearly all cases he or she is the head of the armed forces, the supreme commander in war and the person who bestows highest decorations or even military ranks. In this regard, it is rather clear that the AGs we know as armies have a special connection with the nature of the state, different from other instruments of state power. Armies in established polities have a peculiar character: they are the one organisation that always extracts resources from the budget (Howard, 2009). Infrastructure may fall on the wayside. The administration of justice can be subcontracted to other authorities or altogether privatised. Social services in the hands of the central government, such as education, health or pensions are a historical novelty and are often cut or repurposed. Road construction may or may not be a priority of the state. But the group that will always extract resources from the state, the group that can be cut but never too much and never wholly eliminated, it is the AG that we know as the army. Sure, military budgets can be cut. Long periods of peace and lack of foreign threats, as well as catastrophic economic collapse, be they in peacetime or due to the loss of a conflict, of an overseas empire or territory to another state could lead to substantial economic losses for the AG, but it is never consciously trimmed to a level at which it would not be able to guarantee internal social order, even if it cannot project much power outside a state’s borders (Kennedy, 2017). One could object that there might be situations when hollowed-out armies could be left in a position

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in which they could not defend the central government from armed internal opponents. That could certainly be the case. However, virtually no government chooses to eliminate or neutralise the potential for violence of its armed forces. Yet armies can and do, for instance, split. In cases of civil strife, or simple disagreement between elites or powerful figures each aiming for control of the polity, armies can fracture with factions supporting one specific camp. Up until modernity, which saw the prominence in civil warfare of AGs that had not started within established armies, the course of internal war usually saw a state’s army dividing against itself (Howard, 2009). This was a relatively simple process in pre-modern times and before the advent of national, mass armies. Previously, different army units or sections, deployed in various territories of the polity, while nominally under the authority of the central government or the monarch, could hold deeper allegiance to their leaders, often seen as connected with certain regions, tribes or particular habits. If and when these leaders decided to rebel, contest or outright try to overthrow central authority altogether or by seeking to establish an independent polity, the units under their control could follow them into rebellion. Thus, they became the separate type of AGs that we can call legitimacy contestants. The history of ancient empires is replete with such cases. In sixth century BC Persia, the Achaemenid dynasty came to power when sections of the armed forces threw in their lot with Darius, who personally had little claim to the throne (Herodotus, 2009). The Roman Republic collapsed after almost five decades in which ambitious politicians holding (or in some cases not even holding) official positions within the state that involved command over sections of the armed forces decided to contest the existing equilibrium of power within the Senate (Mommsen, 2010). This varied from personal and semi-ideological disputes between adversaries such as Sulla and Marius to conflicts that could even lead to the separation of the Republic within distinct polities, such as the final struggle between Octavian and Mark Antony. These conflicts usually featured rebellious leaders switching towards themselves control over legions. If allegiance was obtained, the legions became AGs supporting new claimants for power seeking to establish a new order (while often claiming to restore an older, “proper” order of things) (Goldsworthy, 2013). There were, however, some cases in which power-hungry politicians without military forces under their direct command had to create their own AGs, often using men with military experience. This was the case of the early career of Pompey Magnus or of the rebellion of Brutus and Cassius against Octavian (Appian, 1957). The “Crisis of the Third Century” witnessed a similar pattern. Regional commanders of Roman armed forces found reasons to rebel against the emperor and in many cases their legions followed them into their authority-contesting enterprise. Whether the enterprise was successful or not, the pattern repeated itself for the better part of seven decades (Edwards et  al., 1970). Some Byzantine dynasties also tended to fall in such manner, with a powerful regional commander using the forces under his command as an AG to bring him to power. This was, for instance, the case of emperor Heraclius. Son of the powerful Exarch of Africa and thus controlling the resources and troops of the region, he and his father rose in the year 608 against emperor Phocas, eventually defeating and executing him in 610 (Kaegi, 2003).

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The European Middle Ages, stretching the better part of a millennium, seems to be a better example in what concerns armed contestation of central authority by supposedly subordinate AGs, but this can be contested. While ancient empires and modern polities usually featured cohesive AGs under central control that we call armies, the split allegiances, legitimacies and general heteronomy of the Middle Ages present a different situation (Haldén, 2017). While in certain cases nominal states, such as the Kingdom of France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Norman Kingdom of England, could gather military forces under the command of the king or the emperor, these forces were unified just temporarily and usually for very specific campaigns, usually agreed in advance with the powerful lords of the realm (Howard, 2009). Otherwise, these patchy polities presented a picture of substantial diversity in terms of AGs. The king had its personal bodyguard, paid mercenaries and sometimes levies from its personal lands as AGs under its command. All lords of importance, however, boasted their own personal (private is a loaded term, best avoided in non-modern circumstances) AGs, with retainers and levies from their lands and perhaps hired mercenaries of their own. “Civil” war between powerful or not so powerful lords, featuring AGs of different sizes and types, was a constant of the Middle Ages (Contamine, 1980). While that type of warfare is not easily connected with the issue of order, one may argue that it was not so much different from raiding, with spoils meant to satiate the needs of members of the AGs and thus internal order. However, the AGs commanded by lords, often in powerful coalitions, were often used against kings and emperors (or, in certain cases such as in the “dark century”, even against the pope) (Zimmermann, 1983). While the sacred nature of kingship and the Pope’s status of successor of Peter precluded in most cases an altogether replacement of the king or the pope, these rebellions were often successful. If so, order within the kingdom was shaped by the desires of successful lords supported by their personal AGs (Montgomery, 1976). But rebellions by powerful lords stretched beyond the end of the Middle Ages and even centuries after the formation of permanent armies under the command of the king. As late as the mid-seventeenth century, French powerful lords could raise armed forces (or turn royal regiments and urban militias) against central authority in campaigns that lasted many years. During the Fronde, they mobilised a vast array of AGs against the king and his first minister, both in rural and urban settings (Goubert, 2014). Even if ultimately unsuccessful from a military point of view, the systematic use of AGs by these lords forced the emerging absolutist monarchy to placate the most important noble families, a policy it never changed until its own collapse in the late eighteenth century during the Revolution (Bluche, 2014; Mathiez, 1922). During recent times, governmental armies have split into competitive AGs seeking the establishment of order either on a national or a more regional scale. In 1861 the U.S. armed forces split into federal and confederate, with the latter becoming an AG dedicated to the preservation of a special type of social order in the American South (Keegan, 2011). During the Russian Civil War, the former tsarist army shattered and was reconstituted by different leaders into separate AGs. Some supported the Lenininst government, some its “White” competitors under different guises.

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Others fought on behalf of nationalist governments in Kiev or the Caucasus or went against the state altogether when enrolling under the black flags of Nestor Makhno (Malet, 1982; Stone, 2006). In post-1912 China, a similar phenomenon happened, with former imperial army units coming under different warlords, some seeking to establish a national government while others tried to establish personal fiefdoms in areas of the country (Roberts, 1989). However, armies are, more often than not, only one of the AGs generally operating under the control of state authorities. Some polities feature army-like AGs, more appropriately called regional militias that are supposed to help guarantee social order should the main military forces become overstretched. One such example is the United States’ National Guard. Originally the militia that was supposed to provide the citizen’s reassurance that the government will not become tyrannical, it significantly evolved over the centuries. By the mid-twentieth century for instance it had become a full-blown military instrument of the state, sending fully manned divisions for garrison duty in Japan during the Korean War (Newton, 1962). But perhaps the most commonly seen AG, with whom most inhabitants of a polity would have at least some visual contact at some point in their lives is represented by police forces. Indeed, police forces are, for lack of a better expression, the embodiment of the political essence of the AGs. They are, generally, local groups of armed persons, permanently organised and whose primary, declared purpose, is the preservation of order on a specific territory. One can assume that in the earliest polities, when the written word was something of the future, proto-police forces operated based on custom and the personal and traditional authority of the leaders of the community, whereas in the earliest communities, devoid of any substantial leadership, order was the “outcome of the limitations set [by custom, A.M.] to the ambitions of individuals and groups” (Banton, 1970, p.  264). However, very early after the formation of states, police forces—in whatever form they came, as city or village guards for instance—claim to defend an order that is enshrined in the abstraction we call law. It matters little for the political analysis of social order and AGs if the source of the law is to be found in divine commandments, in the will of a divinity-appointed ruler or in the national will expressed through elected representatives. For the purposes of order, the law is the same thing: a codified abstraction, vastly autonomous from the desires of most humans inhabiting a certain polity at a certain moment in time, hard to modify and usually based on seldom-debated or even non-debated higher principles. Anarchist political theory has long dismissed the pretense of state fetishists that law is anything but the will of the ruling elites and another demonstration is not necessary here (Reclus, 2006; Sahlins, 2017; Stirner, 1900; Watson, 1998). Police forces come, of course, in many guises and manifestations. They can vary in appearance from the single village guard armed with no more than a wooden stick to Renaissance Paris’s police which included a heavy force of archers. Their style can vary from the English Bobbie affably approaching an elderly lady appearing lost on a crowded Manchester street or a Sheriff’s Department mobile crew from a small town in Indiana helping a stranded motorist to machine gun wielding, dog supported patrols in Communist Timișoara (Romania), stopping citizens to check

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IDs and forcefully taking members of musical subcultures to the police station for a haircut and maybe a little hosing (Covaci, 1994). Yet these differences must be understood as superficial. The function of every police force is essentially the same and, no matter the style or the approach, behind every police person lies the threat of violence, incarceration or even death for those who would seek to subvert social order. In this, one might even say that police forces in absolutist states or in modern dictatorships are more honest in their deportment, which is the clear manifestation of their actual function. Much like the army, police forces are an ancestral type of AG that virtually anywhere and at any point in time extracts resources from the authorities. In communities facing economic, demographic or spiritual crisis other social or religious services could disappear. Schools can close or be relocated due to the lack of money or children. Medical facilities can also disappear or be relocated when authorities decide that their presence in a certain area makes little or no sense. Dwindling communities of worshippers could lead to the closure of churches, temples or mosques. But the police station, once established, tends to stay. And even if it is moved, members of a territorial community at peace can be assured that the presence of police forces can always be counted upon when called or when an authority thinks it is appropriate. Money will always pour in the coffers of those AGs that defend social order, be they police, gendarmerie or intelligence services, but especially to those that actually defend order on the ground. In order to maintain their social function, regular police forces can enlist the help of ad-hoc, citizen-based AGs. Posses are a reality stretching centuries and generally fulfilling the same role as police forces do, with perhaps less care for procedures and a strict application of the law. Those groups featured ad-hoc gatherings of armed citizens, ranging from groups temporarily mandated by the authorities to restore order in the American West to similar groups looking for murderers and thieves in medieval Moldavia and Wallachia (Kopel, 2014; Vătavu, 2014). Self-funded and self-supported in most cases, these AGs are impermanent in the sense that at the end of their mission, be they successful or not, they are expected to disband, with their members returning to their previous roles in the community. However, another ad-hoc and impermanent AG occasionally arrives on the scene, dishing out its own interpretation of what social order should be. These armed groups are mostly known as vigilantes. These groups appear at the intersection of law-abiding and state-supporting armed groups and regular criminality (by criminality we understand, throughout this book, an activity deemed illegal by the elites of a constituted human community based on abstract sets of rules). While their actions can in most cases be regarded by authorities and state fetishists as outright criminal, they are, at least in the eyes of the perpetrators, nothing more than the implementation of certain rules upholding social order that the state either cannot, or simply would not implement. Vigilantes apprehend criminals that escape central justice and deliver them rough justice, leading up to the person’s death. Vigilante mobs publicly shame those that worked with the enemy in wartime. In 1944–1945 in France and Italy, such mobs have killed, beaten or shaven the heads of thousands of people deemed as collaborators with the Nazis or the Fascist authorities or

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occupiers (Judt, 2006). In previous centuries, such groups would delight in the tarring and feathering of those deemed, for one reason or another, undesirable in a certain community (Irvin, 2003). Yet certain of these vigilante groups live on the border between ad-hoc gatherings delivering their own brand of justice and outright “terrorist” groups. While the nature of their actions is virtually identical, the difference between the first and the second type of vigilante groups is to be found more in the hypocritical way in which they are seen by the state and its supporters, according to the mores and principles of the time. If we look, for instance, at the American Ku Klux Klan, its principles, goals and even modus operandi were not all that different from its inception during the immediate post-Civil War years up until its last massive manifestations in the 1960s. Essentially, it was a collection of local citizens’ groups dedicated to the defence of an order that was partially legal (Jim Crow legislation) and partially moral, for instance regarding intimate relations between black and whites. Its brand of justice (beatings, threats, cross burning and lynching) went virtually unchanged and rarely if ever challenged in its manifestation for a century (Cunningham, 2013). Even its development in a public, national organization in the interwar period did not change any of these characteristics. It is only the changed perceptions of authorities and society (mostly on West and East Coast United States) that led to a different government approach towards these vigilantes after the early 1960s. While vigilantes, unlike police, are difficult to control, the state can create other structures and armed groups ready to act at its behest. Intelligence agencies fall in this category. Unlike most other AGs which, even if they end up operating under the authority of the central government, do not originate in the will of the power elite, intelligence agencies everywhere are armed groups created by governments (Andrew, 2018). In this particular sense, they are perhaps the least independent AG of those discussed here. While they can be understood in the framework of social order and their actions do indeed support the creation and maintaining of a particular type of order, by themselves intelligence agencies are neither needed nor indeed capable of generating order. Unlike other AGs, intelligence agencies are instruments. They cannot exist outside the state, as it is rather hard to imagine that they would become rogue AGs, as police forces can and indeed do so (an excellent case is that of Mexican former police and army members that joined or, in some cases, even formed drug cartels) (Brands, 2009). Intelligence agencies, while created by some of the earliest major polities such as the Roman Empire (Sheldon, 1998; Voskuilen, 2005), do not permeate the history of state development in the same sense as other state-supporting AGs do. Indeed, numerous polities had no intelligence agencies whatsoever and their creation on a global scale is quite obviously a rather modern phenomenon. However, the fact that they exist only in relation to the state should not lead to the hasty conclusion that intelligence agencies lack substantial power and ability to influence politics. The history of many communist regimes has been described, often with a grain of truth, as that of the conflict between the party and the intelligence agencies. In the early Cold War United States, CIA’s policies on assassination varied significantly from the desires of government officials and ended up by embarrassing them (Weiner,

2  Historical Aspects of Armed Groups

23

2008). By the 1970s, Italian intelligence was cooperating with extremist right-wing groups against leftist radicals and was colluding with the Cosa Nostra in covert programs aiming at setting up a resistance movement should the country be overrun by Soviet troops or a communist takeover. Yet this exercise of power in defence of order (or trying to create a distinct one) is always accomplished within the confines of the state. Intelligence agencies never seek sovereignty. This historical and theoretical exercise in the course of inception and development of AGs in their connection with social order would not be complete without a mention of those groups acting either autonomous, either directly against the state. While the next chapter is dedicated to them in its entirety, some mention, at least of their genesis, is necessary here. Of protests against state authority turning violent one hears throughout the ages. Yet protests against a certain type of order can and did go in a variety of directions. One group can challenge an existing order for reasons connected with the fundamental ideological or religious principles underlying that order. Another group simply disagrees with the way in which power is distributed at central or local levels of government and just seeks the replacement of some officials with others. Yet others could disagree with the way economic goods are distributed in a given polity and either seek redistribution, either the circumvention of the rules or laws concerning economic matters. One type of AG might coalesce into another, but they are however reasonably distinct. Insurgent or revolutionary AGs must have appeared soon after it became obvious to members of a polity that the new, abstract rules concerning authority actually exclude most of them from any meaningful political position inside their community. Historical records of the earliest empires are replete with stories of peasant riots or pastoralist revolts. Slaves rose with violence against their captors, vendors, buyers and masters not long after being shackled (Schiavone, 2013). Newly submitted cities soon found ways to challenge with military means the new rules imposed on them. Disenfranchised urban workers often found reasons to quarrel with their employers and their backers, usually the police or the military forces (Hobsbawm, 1971). Groups adhering to a certain religious orientation became aggrieved when authorities either sought to impose a different, unique religion or simply tried to destroy their particular cult. As soon as there was oppression there was violent reaction to that oppression. Many of these revolts are fast, spontaneous manifestations in which nothing more serious is to be seen than ad-hoc gathered crowds wielding bats, stones and working tools turned into weapons attacking and burning buildings and burning public records, molesting or killing some of the oppressors or simply breaking some windows. If cool heads or the cooler steel of governmental AGs (Gwynn, 1934, p. 30) did not quell the troubles, these ad-hoc rioting groups could and did turn into something more dangerous. If they withstood the test of time and the initial reaction of the authorities and if leaders with serious plans emerged, these groups acquired the organisation, weapons and agenda that could turn them into insurgent AGs. From here on begins the history of organised armed rebellion, which is certainly the subject of another investigation. What concerns us here is that these AGs

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fundamentally rise against social order, either by simply contesting it or by trying to create a new one. Yet revolt from down below was harder to organise and sustain than violent struggle waged by elites at the centre of power. It was (and still is, as contemporary examples from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Libya or Mexico show us) much easier for members of the elite, with the political, symbolic and financial capital at hand, to mobilise AGs that would help them overthrow the persons currently holding the highest offices. These AGs need not be necessarily recruited from already existing AGs such as the police or the army. Nor do they need to be recruited from within the borders of the polity. Mercenaries could come from anywhere. Revolts against medieval kings or free city-states often featured insubordinate lords or prominent citizens mobilising their resources in men and money as well as hiring mercenaries to create competing anti-governmental AGs. The Hundred Years War or conflicts in seventeenth century Europe were replete with such examples (Thomson, 1996). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s competing political factions in newly independent African states used mercenaries or even mercenary firms with Belgian, English, American or French employees (Arnold, 1999). As regularly as they worked for government forces, mercenaries and mercenary companies fought for movements seeking to overthrow an established order. To them one can add the “mercenaries of the heart and mind”, the foreign volunteers choosing to constitute their own AGs to support a revolutionary movement or a specific side in a civil war. The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War are perhaps the best-known example in this regard (Beevor, 2012). Both the revolts from down below and elite groups seeking to overthrow other elite groups can spark civil wars, in their sense best described in a Weberian sense as conflicts involving the collapse of the monopoly of violence through armed internal challenge (Kalyvas, 2006, pp. 17–18). In these civil wars, the variety of government and anti-government AGs will be significant and some of them will be discussed in Chap. 3. Yet some within a certain polity might simply oppose the existing, law-protected distribution of economic goods in a more direct and rather practical way than the elusive and often unsuccessful political or armed political struggle. If they are also willing to strike at the formal rules known as laws that regulate the distribution of said economic goods, they could create armed groups seeking practical economic redistribution in their favour. So was the Cosa Nostra, so was Henry Avery, so was the elusive historical figure that came down to us as Robin Hood. States would label them criminals, be they bandits, pirates or marauders. Social scientists wearing the “lenses of the state” would also analyse them through the field of criminology as organised crime groups. Yet while these approaches do hold value for those willingly surrendering both their lives and their cognitive abilities to the Leviathan, they most certainly pervert a clear-eyed understanding of these groups. To the claimed legitimacy of a government and a constitution in whose writing virtually no member of the polity took part and has little power to disagree with, “criminal” AGs oppose the power and will to shift rules, particularly those concerning the distribution of economic goods in their favour. In this, they are probably at

References

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least as old as the political riots against constituted government forces. Some groups preferred to burn down the villa of their landlord, kill the vicious land agent and dance in the ashes. Others preferred to ambush the rich heiress in the woods, deprive her of her goods and perhaps her life and make haste with the recently acquired wealth towards the closest friendly inn. The first are called rebels or sometimes revolutionaries, while the second can be considered criminals. They both actually just sought to rewrite a state-based social order towards something more agreeable to themselves. The above pages presented a historical and theoretical overview of the genesis of armed groups, especially those connected with the state and state authorities. They drew a portrait of the genesis (and partly of the functioning) of armed groups before and after state formation, in connection with the perennial problem of social order. This approach strengthened the contention that order formation, maintaining and contestation are impossible without armed groups, thus upholding the thesis that basic politics is predicated upon them.

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Edwards, I. E. S., Gadd, C. J., Hammond, N. G. L., Boardman, J., Walbank, F. W., Lewis, D. M., et al. (1970). The Cambridge ancient history: Volume 12, the crisis of empire, AD 193–337. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forey, A. (1992). The military orders from the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. Houndmills: Macmillan International Higher Education. Galeotti, M. (2018). The Vory: Russia's super mafia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gat, A. (2008). War in human civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldsworthy, A. (2013). Caesar: The life of a colossus. London: Hachette. Goubert, P. (2014). Mazarin. Paris: Fayard. Gump, J. O. (2016). The dust rose like smoke: The subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Gwynn, C. W. (1934). Imperial policing. London: Macmillan. Haldén, P. (2017). Heteronymous politics beyond anarchy and hierarchy: The multiplication of forms of rule 750–1300. Journal of International Political Theory, 13(3), 266–281. Hämäläinen, P. (2008). The Comanche empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind. London: Random House. Heather, P. (2010). Empires and barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe. London: Pan Macmillan. Herodotus. (2009). The landmark Herodotus: The histories. New  York: Anchor Books/ Random House. Hobbes, T., & Macpherson, C.  B. (1968). Leviathan; Edited with an Introduction by CB Macpherson. London: Penguin. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1971). Primitive rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Housley, N. (1992). The later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar, 1274–1580. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howard, M. (2009). War in European history. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvin, B.  H. (2003). Tar, feathers, and the enemies of American liberties, 1768-1776. The New England Quarterly, 76(2), 197–238. Judt, T. (2006). Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945. London: Penguin. Kaegi, W. E. (2003). Heraclius, emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kalyvas, S. N. (2006). The logic of violence in civil war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keegan, J. (2011). The American civil war. London: Random House. Kennedy, P. (2017). The rise and fall of British naval mastery. London: Penguin. Kernan, T. J. (1906). The jurisprudence of lawlessness. American Law, 14, 452. Kopel, D. B. (2014). The Posse Comitatus and the Office of Sheriff: Armed citizens summoned to the aid of law enforcement. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 104, 761. Lauchs, M., Bain, A., & Bell, P. (2015). Outlaw motorcycle gangs: A theoretical perspective. London: Springer. Lecca, A. (1972). Papuaşii. Bucureşti: Albatros. Leonardi, C. (2007). Violence, sacrifice and chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan. Africa, 77(4), 535–558. Livingstone, D. (1872). Livingstone’s Africa: Perilous adventures and extensive discoveries in the interior of Africa. Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros. Malet, M. (1982). Nestor Makhno in the Russian civil war. London: Springer. Mantran, R. (1998). Histoire de l'Empire ottoman. Paris: Fayard. Mathiez, A. (1922). La révolution française. Paris: Colin. Mearsheimer, J.  J. (2019). Bound to fail: The rise and fall of the liberal international order. International Security, 43(4), 7–50. Mommsen, T. (2010). The history of Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montgomery, Viscount. (1976). History of warfare. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Mountford, C. P. (1950). Brown men and red sand: Journeyings in wild Australia. London: Praeger. Murphy, M. N. (2013). The barbary pirates. Mediterranean Quarterly, 24(4), 19–42.

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Newton, I. G. (1962). The negro and the national guard. Phylon, 23(1), 18–28. Osiander, A. (2001). Before sovereignty: Society and politics in ancient régime Europe. Review of International Studies, 27(5), 119–145. Patterson, J.  T. (1996). Grand expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perlman, F. (1983). Against his-story, against Leviathan! Detroit, MI: Black & Red. Raab, S. (2016). Five families: The rise, decline, and resurgence of America’s most powerful mafia empires. New York: Macmillan. Ramakrishna, K. (2002). Countering the new terrorism of Al Qaeda without generating civilizational conflict: The need for an indirect strategy. In The New terrorism: Anatomy, trends and counter-strategies (pp. 207–232). Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. Reclus, E. (2006). L'anarchie. Paris: Mille et une nuits. Roberts, J.  A. G. (1989). Warlordism in China. Review of African Political Economy, 16(45–46), 26–33. Rodgers, D. (2006). Living in the shadow of death: Gangs, violence and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(2), 267–292. Sahlins, M. (2017). Stone age economics. New York: Taylor & Francis. Schiavone, A. (2013). Spartacus. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sheldon, R. M. (1998). Jesus, as security risk: Insurgency in first century Palestine? Small Wars & Insurgencies, 9(2), 1–37. Statiev, A. (2010). The Soviet counterinsurgency in the western borderlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stirner, J. C. (1900). L'unique et sa propriété. Paris: Stock. Stone, D. R. (2006). A military history of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the war in Chechnya. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Thomson, J. E. (1996). Mercenaries, pirates, and sovereigns: State-building and extraterritorial violence in early modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, C. (1975). Western state-making and theories of political transformation. In The formation of national states in Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vătavu, B. (2014). The boyars and the haiduks: From enmity to collaboration. In Seminatores in artium liberalium agro. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Academiei Române. Voskuilen, T. (2005). Operation Messiah: Did christianity start as a roman psychological counterinsurgency operation? Small Wars & Insurgencies, 16(2), 192–215. Watson, D. (1998). Against the megamachine: Essays on empire and its enemies. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Watt, R. N. (2002). Raiders of a lost art? Apache war and society. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 13(3), 1–28. Weiner, T. (2008). Legacy of ashes: The history of the CIA. Anchor. Zhukov, Y. (2007). Examining the authoritarian model of counter-insurgency: The Soviet campaign against the Ukrainian insurgent army. Small Wars & Insurgencies, 18(3), 439–466. Zimmermann, H. (1983). Das dunkle Jahrhundert. Bucuresti: Editura științifică și enciclopedică.

Chapter 3

Beyond the State: Armed Groups and Social Order

Abstract  This chapter deals extensively with those armed groups that set themselves at odds with established central authorities. It does so in order to argue that even these groups are fundamentally concerned with the establishment of social order, be it by overtaking a government, by challenging the basis of political and economic repartition in an existing social order, by challenging the moral basis of a society or simply by creating an alternative, parallel order. It discusses both political-­ ideological and economic exploitative armed groups, focusing on their organisation, operations and links with social order. Keywords  Armed groups · Social order · Operations · Insurgency · Organised crime

Armed groups uncoordinated by state authorities, those going against them one way or another have puzzled political theorists virtually since the beginning of serious reflection on the possible nature of politics. As mentioned before, a good number of scholars have simply chosen to ignore them. Indeed, most political theory deals exclusively with power structures, the distribution of power and relatively peaceful competition for power in settled communities. But this is, as we have seen, an entirely sketchy portrayal of actual politics. From the perspective embraced here, the state-centric perspective is at best a substantially incomplete model for thinking about politics and at worst a distortion of facts as they present themselves to a close investigation of how power and especially order actually work. The following pages will try to insert deeper into political theory those armed groups opposing the state in some fashion. From the beginning one should say that opposition to the state per se is not necessarily the primary goal of many or even most of these AGs. Indeed, many of the rebels, insurgents and revolutionaries mentioned below have nothing to do with the contestation of the concept of state per se.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Miroiu, Political Theory of Armed Groups, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51012-1_3

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Rather, they oppose certain governments for reasons having to do, among others, with the government’s tyranny, lack of representativeness, domination or oppression of an ethnic, religious or racial minority or occupation of a territory deemed as wrongful. Some of the rebels seek nothing more than to become the government, or create governmental structures of their own in territories they dominate. Very few, like the anarchists in the Russian Civil War, the Zapatistas in Chiapas or some warlords in Central and Eastern Africa sought to do away completely with the state as a form of organisation of human communities. Some have promised to do just that but instead have delivered the exact opposite. The Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia and the Maoists in mainland China argued that their regimes will end with the dissolution of the state following the dissolution of capitalism. Instead, they have produced strong Leviathans, with the contemporary Chinese version inching closer and closer to being truly totalitarian. When considering this, it would appear that some of the primarily exploitative AGs, those the authorities usually label as parts of “organised crime” are actually more consistent in their opposition to the state than their homologues focusing more on the political and ideological dimension of things. Indeed, while the state and social mores are not the primary concern of most of these AGs (with the possible exception of “outlaw” motorcycle gangs), they nevertheless do not seek to supplant its most nefarious characteristics. As we shall see, although they do provide a significant range of public goods, these exploitative AGs do not attempt to replace the state, but to permanently subvert it. The AGs operating beyond the purview of state authorities will be divided in the following pages in two vast categories. The first comprises groups whose primary function is to extract economic resources from a given community by violence and threats of violence while operating against the set of abstract rules constituted governments call “laws”. What drives them is an attempt to create a parallel, distinct social order from the mainstream one, an order that would both reward them materially and respect their own set of moral rules. The second category comprises groups whose essential motivator is political or ideological. While they do operate economic extraction, this is in a support role to their main goals. Rebels, insurgents and revolutionaries seek a comprehensively or even totally new social order, either in the polity at large or in the territory they seek to dominate. Each category is presented in three fundamental dimensions, with sections on their organisation, operations and, fundamentally for the purposes of this book, on their links with social order.

3.1  Exploitative Groups Exploitative armed groups comprise, for the purposes of this section, those AGs that are mostly focused on obtaining economic benefits beyond or against the possibilities offered by what is legal in a given community (Le Dantec, 1911). To obtain this, they use violence or the threat of violence towards those from whom such resources can be obtained. From the perspective of the state, these AGs are part of “organised

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crime”. While a reader more sympathetic to perspectives privileging the state might be taken aback by the use of quotation marks, it might be useful that he or she reflects upon what is deemed illegal at different times in history. In Stalinist Ukraine in the 1930s it was illegal for literally starving farmers to keep the product of their own labour in order to feed their families. In medieval England it was illegal for anyone but the king to hunt deer in certain forests. Up until the middle of the twentieth century it was illegal in many Western countries to distribute printed or visual materials depicting explicit sexual acts. In most Muslim countries it was and sometimes still is illegal to distribute alcoholic drinks. The distribution of most narcotics is still illegal in the twenty-first century, while in the nineteenth century Great Britain made its empire in East Asia by violently imposing itself as the main drug dealer on the Chinese markets. To this day it is illegal in most countries for a person born without resources to just go and claim land resources when these have already been claimed by others who own an abundance of it, be they private entities, individuals or the state. In some cases, it is even illegal to cross or to camp for the night on privately owned land. In a not insignificant number of states, the government itself is infused with persons and groups involved in “organised crime” activities, which sometimes manage to turn them into “mafia states” (Naím, 2012). One may thus rightfully infer that there is a certain fluidity in defining economic “crime”, both historically and culturally. From this perspective, embracing the morality of the governments is of little help if our purpose is to understand economic exploitative AGs. In order to get a more thorough appreciation of bandits, pirates, marauders, raiders and mafiosos, one should look through their own lenses at their organisation, operations and approach of social order.

3.1.1  Organisation Economic exploitative groups can vary substantially in matters concerning their organisational features. There are myriad possibilities between the street-gang— which might boast no formal rules altogether (except perhaps for obeisance due to the strongest, shrewdest and the most violent member of the group)—to a structure with a top-down organisational chart and numerous formal rules and induction rites such as the American Cosa Nostra or an outlaw motorcycle club of international scale. This last example of a highly organised group is all the more interesting, as it sustained over the last decades a substantial transition from what some authors call a rebel, socially deviant group towards a gangster-style organisation. Indeed, up until the present day some of these groups (of whom Hells Angels, the Nomads, Comancheros, Bandidos and the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington are but the best known) can still boast “radical” (read gangster) vs. “barbarian” (read classical, anti-social norms rebellion) factions of clubs (Lauchs, Bain, & Bell, 2015, p. 29). While important decisions are taken by all the members of a charter through a democratic vote, with some even requiring unanimous approval, a hierarchical structure is present in these avowedly anarchist groups. Local chapters have presidents,

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vice-­presidents, secretaries and sergeants-at-arms, all with different degrees of authority. Inside a larger club, the mother chapter has a substantial degree of authority over the more recently formed chapters (Barker, 2014). To gain membership, a prospective member needs to spend a probation period involving not only humiliation rituals, but also to establish credentials as someone able to perpetrate acts of armed violence on behalf of the club. The induction ceremony, performed only after a unanimous vote of the “full-patch members” is ritualised in its smallest details. Female associates (never full members) undergo their own passing and acceptance rituals involving almost always the unconditional and ever-ready willingness to perform sexual favours for any interested full-patch member (Hopper & Moore, 1983). In fact, from a historical perspective very few economic exploitative AGs have allowed openly serving females as full members of the group. One such exception (but with only two examples) were some of the pirate crews of the Carribbean Golden Age of Piracy, allowing women as group members and not just as shore-based associates (Rediker, 1993). However, this status might be changing even in conservative Catholic communities, with for instance Neapolitan Camorra even having women as temporary bosses (Saviano, 2019). Central American gangs have similar initiation rituals, but the accession standard is considerably higher. Disaffected youth, either lured by the lifestyle of the “bandit” AGs or simply driven by the lack of opportunity and economic penury, have to kill another person in order to cross the threshold between associate and member. Female members have to endure beatings and often to engage in sexual relations with most or all the members of the group (Bruneau, 2014, pp. 159–160). In terms of numbers and permanence, economic exploitative AGs can vary substantially in size. Outlaws from China’s Heilongjiang frontier region in the first decades of the twentieth century could form groups ranging to hundreds and, in some cases, up to a thousand members. Yet these bands, who preyed on new settlers of this frontier territory, attacked authorities and delivered their own brand of justice, often disbanded once the season for the harvesting of the sorghum arrives, with outlaws becoming just farmers for months on end (Shan, 2006, p. 25, 27). In nineteenth century Greece, however, “bandit” AGs—who also had both a social and national dimension by operating mostly against the rich and the Turkish oppressors—had to operate in smaller numbers (Gravel, 1985). This, as well as patterns of trust specific to the geographical region meant that most of these groups were formed by people with blood relations usually no further apart than the uncle/first cousin type. Much like their Chinese counterparts, the many Greek AGs were impermanent, dissolving when the needs of agriculture or of managing real estate took precedence (Gallant, 1988, p. 269, 282). “Bandit” AGs could also be organised as an authority-driven activity. One such striking example is that of the famous Barbary pirates of cities such as Oran or Algiers. In their particular case, as the ruling elites of the cities started losing control in the fourteenth century over their agricultural hinterland to the local Berber tribesmen, they resorted to condoning and even arming pirate crews that ended up preying on the Mediterranean shipping until the French conquest of 1830 put an end to all that and the slave trade that had been the most lucrative enterprise of these cities for

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centuries (Murphy, 2013, p. 24; Lowenheim, 2009, p. 82). In other areas, piracy was encouraged or at least abetted by state actors and their proxies by arming the crews. In mid-nineteenth century Malaya, British merchants sold weapons directly to pirates, as arms trade was legal in Singapore. By doing this, they simply understood that at the time piracy was a real industry, a traditional trade for entire Malaysian tribes (Lavollée, 1853, pp. 579–580). Other polities, such as those in the Madagascar, chose to form close political and economic links with pirate communities of European extraction that operated from their shores in the seventeenth century. In time, they used techniques and technologies acquired from these AGs to strengthen their own polities, shaping them in state-like form (Hooper, 2011, p. 218). In medieval Japan, powerful pirate captains behaved like entrepreneurs by offering services as AGs for hire to local feudal lords, moving between them without impunity and according to the change in the balance of interests. In contrast to North Africa, they had the organisational power and measure of success to dictate terms to established territorial authorities (Schetter & Glassner, 2011).

3.1.2  Operations Economic exploitative AGs pursue a vast category of operational practices, whose goal is almost exclusively the redistribution of goods, services and money in their favour. Some of these groups can specialise in just one type of activity, such as car-­ theft. But others can encompass virtually any “criminal” activity known to man. La Cosa Nostra, whose historical trajectory stretches from the first Italian-American gangs of the late nineteenth century, passing through its institutionalisation in the 1930s and its glory period up until the 1990s, is a striking example in this regard (Dainotto, 2015). Car-theft, truck hijacking, money laundering, racketeering, murder, drug trafficking, bid-rigging, intimidation, stock market fraud, pornography, mail fraud, illegal gambling are all activities pursued by this collection of AGs in its already long history (Raab, 2016). Its Italian counterparts, such as the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, increasingly successful after state authorities dealt severe blows to the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s, all pursue these activities, as well as taking serious interests in construction and banking (Serenata, 2014). In some of these types of operations, Italian criminal groups, particularly those operating in the US and Canada can call on the support of a multitude of allies among smaller, less organised groups, but also of other large structures, such as outlaw motorcycle groups, particularly for gun-running as well as drug-running and distribution (Barker, 2014). But other major outlaw AGs have followed similar patterns, even without the coherence and institutionalisation of the Italian Mafia. Albanian, Russian, Indian, Colombian or Mexican groups have been known to pursue a vast category of criminal operations through violence or the threat of violence, increasingly internationalizing their operations as the transit of information, goods and people has become easier and cheaper (Glenny, 2009). Among the operations typical for pirates, old

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and new, one can find for instance thievery, hijacking, smuggling, counterfeiting, or kidnapping (Dawdy & Bonni, 2012, p. 675). Most of these operations are characterized by a vast degree of violence, sometimes indiscriminate. Its use is not only to immediately submit the targeted population or group, but also to cement a long-term appreciation of the potential of the AG to do bodily harm, leading up to murder. This, for instance, is the standard approach of Latin American “criminal” groups (Bruneau, 2014, p. 153). The violence pursued by some of the street-gangs in areas particularly affected by poverty, “lawlessness” and brutal state authorities could, in some instance, look more like guerrilla warfare in its manifestations (Cross, 1964, pp.  56–57). The cross-fertilization of techniques and approaches between economic exploitative AGs and political-ideological AGs has been observed not only in the similarity of their operational procedures, but also in the way in which state authorities deal with them: “insurgents tend to operate like gang structures, and police gang suppression approaches that focus on community security, network displacement and a layered method of overt police presence, criminal informants, and undercover operations is analogous to counterinsurgency, especially in urban environments. Likewise, some terrorist networks share structural and operational similarities with organized crime networks, and police methods against organized crime syndicates—financial and logistical controls, counternetwork operations, detainee exploitation, penetration by informants, and targeted disruption—are similar to the methods used against terrorists.” (Kilcullen, 2010, p.  183). In historical times, authorities could rely also on methods that had less to do with counter-gang operations and more with securing their territorial basis through services for the community. In “bandit-infested” Greek territories, the Ottoman Porte used to send foodstuffs to communities deprived of them by bandit attacks. Also, the government was paying salaries to families of policemen killed fighting bandits and provided funds to rebuild houses and other constructions burned by gangs (Cayli, 2018, pp. 433–434). To a certain point, one can see this as an attempt to pursue a hearts and minds policy, as some economic exploitative groups, in addition to what one can see as predatory activities, also engaged in regular trade and economic exchange with the locals. Pirates established on the shores of the Madagascar in the seventeenth century did that, both with local communities and visiting Western ships (Hooper, 2011, p.  228). Yet in all this, while part of the general pattern of exchange, they maintained independent options and operations through the entirety of their existence. In medieval Japan, for instance, pirate lords “developed specific, discrete relations of service to a variety of sponsors. Operating outside the institutional frameworks of traditional authorities, sea lords moved between sponsors with impunity, playing factions against each other for maximum benefit. In effect, they were entrepreneurial mercenaries who sold their services as marketable commodities.” (Shapinsky, 2009, p. 277). The same powerful armed groups could enter into powerful, direct competition for territorial command with state authorities. At times, they have attacked and assassinated officials, local but also highly placed members of armed forces, police or the justice system. The Sicilian Mafia, for instance, famous for having waged a

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campaign against the Italian state in the 1980s and 1990s—including bombing highways, killing judges and generals, had a history of assassinating authorities stretching back decades (Blok, 2001). Mexican drug cartels waged bloody battles with police forces using truck-mounted heavy machine guns when authorities tried to arrest one of its leaders (BBC, 2019). At other times, economic exploitative groups do not confront the state because they become the state. In such polities, political elites make fortunes for themselves and their families by using “criminal” groups’ tactics, force, money and political influence and in order to strengthen their own power positions (Naím, 2012, p. 101).

3.1.3  Economic Exploitative Groups and Social Order Most statists would (and have, throughout history) argued that economic exploitative armed groups are, together with lost foreign wars, devastating civil warfare and economic collapse, powerful symbols of the possible collapse of social order. It is easy to see why the political theory that fetishises the state would go in that direction. For such ideologues, individuals and human communities know their interests only in the most abstract of meanings and only if they conform with social mores and moral rules that others have constructed (where “others” stand for elites or divine intervention). The state is endowed not only with the monopoly of “legitimate” violence (an act that by itself all but abolishes individual freedom), but also with a form of moral superiority. Even Mancur Olson, who otherwise was able to see economic exploitative AGs as providers of public goods, succumbs to the equation of anarchy (read order created by said AGs) with (dis)order and lawlessness (Olson, 1993). Others, though more sympathetic to the possibility of creating a rebel order outside the confinements of state authorities, notice that for establishing that order, elements of such groups turn to “organised crime”. Outlaw motorcycle groups, in particular, are highlighted as boasting both a rebel, anti-state-run social order and a “criminal faction”, sometimes overtaking the first in importance (Lauchs et al., 2015, p. 29). State supporters systematically ignore the historical record that states are nothing but the political expression of ruling elites and their command of economic and military means of power. By confusing norms for reality, they create an erroneous theoretical reality which is then enthroned into science and worse, into laws. Anarchist political theory, instead, looks at individual and community agency by themselves and therefore sees economic exploitative AGs as structures that can indeed create their own brand of social order. While this order is not necessarily geographical, it still supplies the set of rules (consented or not, it matters not for reality) that provides the framework for the functioning of a specific economy. The tension between the two types of explanation is most aptly seen in the debates on the nature of piracy, particularly Western European piracy in the Golden Age stretching from the 1690s until the 1720s. Statists would choose to see it in the words of H.  Rankin: “pirates were a sorry lot of human trash. Much whimsical

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romanticism has created a quixotic image from rogues and knaves. It didn’t take much to be a pirate—an evil spirit in a restless body” (Rankin, 1969, p. 22). Yet a still novel historiography, much of it written in a Marxist vein, sees the same pirates as almost-revolutionary opponents to an exploitative social and economic order and to brutal state regulations that were confining them to nothing more than cheap, disposable labour force in precarious, insecure and seriously unhealthy conditions (Rediker, 2004). For certain authors, pirates are a direct product of the nefarious effects of accelerated “capital accumulation” in the late seventeenth century. Especially after the end of the Spanish Succession War in 1713, the contradictions between labour and capital become acute in the New World. In a response to governmental pressure, pirates would practice indirect terror against the owners of mercantile property. This unleashed a cycle of violence between the pirates and authorities, with the Atlantic empires, led by Britain, organizing an international campaign of terror to eradicate piracy. The campaign, waged under the banners of the still relatively new Hanoverian dynasty, led some pirates such as John Russell towards an outward projection of Jacobite values and symbols. While their actions (and ship articles’) prove beyond doubt that Caribbean pirates were constructing their own social order, this assumption of an identity, while statist in its outward manifestation, can be taken as another instance of anti-regime action, as the chances for a Jacobite restoration had always been slim after 1690 (Bialuschewski, 2011, p. 159). The hierarchical structure of the Caribbean pirate ship’ (if one may even call it hierarchy) was marked by a rough, improvised but effective egalitarianism that placed authority in the collective hands of the crew. Some argue that total democracy reigned aboard the ship in the act of choosing and deposing the captain, who only had full authority in battle and during pursuit. Distrusting even this type of authority, the captain was always balanced by the quartermaster who guarded pirate tradition, spoke and cared for the crew and, very importantly, decided the distribution of prizes. A further argument has to do with the division of spoils, as even the captain and the main officers of the pirate ship never took more than a share and a half of the prizes, while normal, chartered privateering often meant profits of over 10% for the captain (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2013; Rediker, 2004). Certainly, the bounties helped the economy of pirate safe-havens, such as those of Tortuga and Port Royal. As the pirates encouraged each other to spend lavishly on local produce and services such as liquor, good quality clothes, jewelry and prostitution, they also created conditions for the establishment of a ground-based social order based on plunder (Dawdy & Bonni, 2012, p. 679). Similar arguments for the creation of a pirate-run social order have been brought by scholars who worked on the mid-seventeenth century Republic of Salé, a most peculiar polity that endured for a few decades on the site of the contemporary capital of Morocco, Rabat. In this case, pirates—in cooperation with town authorities— run for decades an independent, democratic polity based on preying on Western commerce in the Atlantic and raiding the coasts of Europe as far north as Ireland (Wilson, 2003). The Dutch pirate Claes Compaen’s ship and expeditions can similarly be seen as a deliberate break with state-run social order and the attempt to

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create a temporary zone in which a fully democratic social order would be created, even if confined only to the deck of the ship (Snelders, 2005). As J.  Thomson noticed, privateers, pirates and mercenaries competed with states for the creation of social order throughout modern history, up until the point when states had the power to “nationalize violence”, a situation that was fully implemented no earlier than the second half of the nineteenth century (Thomson, 1996, p. 11). What applied to the Golden Age pirates could also be said about certain categories of “bandits”. Indeed, some have noticed that certain groups could contribute to social welfare by actively opposing and going against unpopular laws, defending against depredations made by governments, and even by providing security, protection and legal support in areas untouched by state authorities (Curott & Fink, 2012, p. 471). This was for instance the case of the rather large “bandit” AGs operating in the first decades of the twentieth century in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang. A product of that particular region, freshly settled and still looking like a frontier society, bandit groups profited from the absence or the weakness of the government to act as a government and sometimes to offer security services against other armed groups (Shan, 2006, p. 31, 35). A similar pattern for the creation of AGs could be seen in late 20th and early twenty-first centuries Central and South America. In some regions and cities of the Latin American world, the creation of armed street gangs can be linked to poverty but more strongly to the normalisation of violence in authoritarian, militarized and corrupt societies (Bruneau, 2014, p. 155). In Rio de Janeiro, for instance, street gangs were usually connected with prison gangs and, while moving towards control of the drug routes and trafficking became their main activity since the 1980s, they also fulfilled a social role by siphoning political patronage funds towards themselves and the favelas they dominate (Arias, 2014). In certain settled regions, particularly in zones where state intervention and pressure are a relatively new phenomenon, “bandit” activity can be seen as a reaction towards the defence of a decaying social order (Hobsbawm, 1969). In Southern Italy, for instance, late nineteenth century banditry can be linked to political reforms in rural areas threatening established life patterns and livelihoods (Cayli, 2018). Certain peasant societies, in particular, were hotbeds for what some authors still refer to as social banditry. In these communities, such as those in the mountainous areas of Greece in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, “banditry” was a way of life deriving from the pervading violence that characterized not only many aspects of social life, but also traversed like a thin red line the horizontal or vertical networks in which particularly the men of the villages participated and found meaning into (Gallant, 1988, p. 282). Italian-American mafiosi, too, have created a plausible explanation for the beginning of organised crime amongst recently arrived Italian immigrants to the United States in the reaction to the perceived exclusion of these groups from the bounties of the new continent. According to this retelling of their founding, the American Cosa Nostra AGs have appeared as opponents to a social and economic order perceived as discriminatory on ethnic and religious criteria (Dainotto, 2015). In this, they went on a completely different path from the Indian Ocean local pirates and sea-lords of the seventeenth century, who cooperated with state

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authorities or chieftains of polities, sometimes serving as instruments in their territorial ambitions, including dominance of sea-lanes (Margariti, 2008). By doing this, they were to a certain extent trying to escape the reality that the campaign to eliminate piracy in the northern Indian Ocean was one of the earliest attempts to impose state sovereignty in the region to the exclusion of other actors. In the southern Indian Ocean, “the reoccurrence of piracy off the coasts of Madagascar illuminated an important process that had begun elsewhere in the Indian Ocean: the European domination of commerce by labelling other trading networks and the use of violence within these networks as illegitimate” (Hooper, 2011, p.  242). For a brief period, pirates acted as competitors in this area, trying to develop their own dominance over local networks of human, economic and symbolic exchange (Shapinsky, 2009, p. 277). Pirates, marauders, bandits and other ruffians seem to share nothing but a desire for plunder and the appropriation through violence of other people’s “property”. However, even if this statist perspective is to be embraced, the above discussion suggests that what they do is actually contest and perhaps create alternative social orders, more akin to their vision and interests. If the statist, high-moral ground perspective is to be abandoned, this argument becomes even clearer.

3.2  Political/Ideological Groups Seemingly, it would be easier to discuss the link between political and ideological AGs and the creation and defence of social order than it was the case of the economic exploitative groups. The latter suffered from a centuries-long theoretical misrepresentation from state fetishists. The former have been more widely recognised as possible creators of social order, in no small measure because this was one of their stated goals. Most rebel groups, be they driven by the desire to overthrow an existing elite group, to establish authority over a given piece of land occupied by what they think is an illegitimate authority, to rewrite the economic rules of distribution in a given territory or to rewrite the moral code of a society, do this in the open. While in the case of economic exploitative groups the creation of a social order was a by-product, in this case it is the reason to be of rebel groups. Yet politically-ideologically driven AGs comprise a vast array of gatherings. As argued elsewhere, they comprise not only all political AGs, but also those religiously-­ driven AGs that some authors see as prevalent in post-Cold War asymmetric warfare (Hoffman, 1997). Being led by the desire to establish a concept-driven social order, they fall in the same category as all the other political and ideological AGs (Miroiu, 2019). Among these politically driven AGs, those who reject state authority whatsoever, whom one could call with a significant degree of imprecision anarchist armed groups are, statistically speaking, a very small minority. Declared anarchist groups in the 1880s–1910s were very small and, despite spectacular attacks resulting in the

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killing of an Austrian Empress, an Italian King, an American and a French president and a few other important Western officials, achieved very little except creating the basis for police cooperation amongst otherwise highly competitive Leviathans. Western European powers and Russia convened two international conferences in Rome (1898) and Sankt Petersburg (1904) against anarchists, laying the basis for international “anti-terrorist cooperation”. Nestor Makhno’s Black Peasant Army wrote beautiful pages in the history of anarchism, but were no match for Trotsky’s Red troops. When confronted by the full might of the Red Army, they were soundly beaten and their remnants driven across the borders of a conservative European state, Romania. The anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War were massacred by Fascist and Stalinist opponents before they crystallized their political plans. Closer to our days, the Zapatistas of Chiapas (who do not necessarily claim anarchist heritage, but do a great job in applying the principles) could be said to be successful. Through non-entirely violent means, though they do possess arms, the Zapatistas have established viable free and fully democratic zones over a substantial rural area of Mexico. Similar things could be argued in favour of some contemporary Bangladeshi hill tribes and other Southeast Asian communities from a substantial number of language and ethnic groups inhabiting James Scott’s Zomia (Thorup, 2008; Newell, 2019; Malet, 1982; Beevor, 2012; Marcos & Moisés, 2008; Wilkinson, 2015; Scott, 2010). Most other political AGs do not have as a declared intention the overthrow of a state-constructed social order but instead aim for substantial changes in the way in which this molds the lives of the inhabitants of a certain polity. Some are groups run by warlords. As old as history, they lord over a piece of territory with or without reproducing fully the characteristics of a state, but without denying it altogether. Some are religiously-driven groups seeking the imposition of their theologically-­ centred worldview on others, preferably in a mono-religious state-structure. As mentioned before, others seek the establishment of a new state on a given territory or the rewriting of the social and economic order in an already existing polity. One should note here that sometimes scholarly literature on the topic operates with different designations for certain types of political-ideological AGs. Authors suggested the need to make distinctions between guerrilla warfare, insurgency and terrorism. Guerrilla is usually taken to refer to a numerically larger group of armed individuals who operate as a military unit, attack enemy military forces and seize and hold territory (even if briefly) while also exercising some form of sovereignty and control over a defined geographical area and its population. Insurgents share the characteristics of the guerrilla but go beyond hit-and-run attacks to embrace revolutionary warfare or people’s war—both older names for what is today called insurgency (Hoffman, 2006, p. 35). This section is not particularly interested with these distinctions and would engage with all types of political-ideological AGs. They will be discussed in the following pages, much like the economic exploitative groups, with a focus on their organization, operations and approach of social order.

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3.2.1  Organization Political-ideological AGs vary substantially in terms of their organization, from the extremely loose collection of cells of anarchist fighters or contemporary radical islamists to real armies endowed with logistics and a party apparatus, such as the one the Chinese Communist Party boasted during the last phases of its war with the Kuomintang in the late 1940s. Perhaps the beginning of a discussion of the organization of these groups should start from the individual, which could be seen in terms suggested by Bruce Hoffman in his larger discussion of terrorists, whom he thinks of “violent intellectuals”, persons willing to use force and violence to achieve their goals (Hoffman, 2006, p. 38). In this, the force of leaders is paramount to explain the success (or relative success) of some of these AGs. Highly experienced and savvy leaders, who can also boast a good dose of charisma, can upend even good counter-insurgent efforts mounted by well-prepared governments. In Cyprus, British forces that had been hardened by counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya or Kenya were finally defeated in a political sense by great leaders such as Colonel George Grivas or Archbishop Makarios. Working both the military and the political angles, they managed to best the British authorities and hasten the island’s march towards independence (Corum, 2008, p. 122). Similarly, in Vietnam, highly trained French and afterwards American troops were no match for the political talents of Ho Chi Minh and the military prowess of Vo Nguyen Giap. To a large extent, this failure was due to the fact that state opponents saw these leaders as fanatics they could not possibly deal with other than by the force of arms. Therefore, they never sought to negotiate until it was too late and the conflict was already lost (Paret, 1964, p. 22). Similarly, they only engaged in negotiations over Algerian independence extremely late in the conflict, after the point when a militarily defeated Front de Liberation Nationale had gained the upper ground by massive peaceful demonstrations in the country’s main cities. In this, they were not all that different from their nineteenth century predecessors. In that age, military commanders and political leaders similarly refused to engage in political dialogue and negotiations with leaders of guerrillas and partisans during the wars and uprisings of the Italian Risorgimento, as they deemed them to be simple “bandits” (Heuser, 2010, p. 397). Leaders such as these can mobilise vast human resources, to the extent that virtually every self-conscious member of a community becomes the supporter of the cause. There is some validity to the claim of George Grivas that in Cyprus almost every Greek over the age of 12 was a supporter of the insurgent organization, EOKA (Grivas, 1964). While British intelligence was able to penetrate the organization successfully and intimidate the local population through torture and executions, it was not enough to cow the population into submission. Moreover, British intelligence located Grivas in February 1959, but prime minister Harold Macmillan refused the go-ahead order to take him out for fear negotiations with Greece and Turkey on the future of the island would collapse, such was the importance attributed to the insurgent leader (Dimitrakis, 2008). When such significant leaders are

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missing, state efforts have a significantly higher chance of succeeding, such as in the case of the Egyptian and Algerian Islamist rebellions of the 1990s, which were soundly defeated despite their military prowess and the inclination towards violence of the rebel AGs (Cline, 1998). Not all political-ideological movements boast the necessary organizational unity to successfully pursue a campaign against a common enemy. In Greece during the 1941–1944 occupation, fighting amongst different left- and right-wing factions opposing the Nazis was endemic during the guerrilla war with the Germans (Rajak, 2010, p. 203). This reflected a fact observed by David Kilcullen, that most insurgencies comprise a number of different factions, some diffuse and sometimes with deeply contrasting agendas, setting them in competition with one another (Kilcullen, 2006). Certain guerrilla groups, of course, do not exist independent from state support. Usually, these enables operations on a wider scale and results in larger, more hierarchical organizations, but this is not necessarily the case. For instance, Indonesian-­ supported guerrillas raiding into Borneo in the 1960s and aiming to unify the island under Indonesian control were small groups with limited armament, despite the aid received from Jakarta (Tuck, 2004, p. 93). Yet other groups supported by foreign governments can grow into substantial armed forces. The Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) opposing French colonial forces in the country’s 1954–1962 War of Independence received money and weapons support from a significant number of Middle Eastern and North African countries. Training camps for its members were established in Morocco and Tunisia and Egyptian intelligence offered support. Boasting uniforms and operating in units as large as battalions, Algerian insurgents’ ambition to be seen as an army is witnessed by their territorial and internal organization, with the country divided in six military commands. Two years into the conflict, the FLN boasted 20,000 troops opposing 190,000 colonial troops (Nouschi, 1994, pp.  213–219). Non-state counter-FLN AGs such as the Organisation de Résistance de L’Algérie Française, first starting out as vigilantes, were soon formed by white settlers and indiscriminately attacked Muslim fighters, civilians and government figures they perceived as favouring peace with the FLN (Kauffer, 1986). It is interesting to note that in other theatres of conflict other AGs took the same path, moving from vigilante groups to political-ideological factions striking at designated adversaries. This was the path of some groups inside the Ulster Volunteer Forces, the loyalist militia fighting the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland during the period known as The Troubles (Ferguson & McAuley, 2017). When no state support is to be received, some insurgent AGs resort to innovative ways of financing their operations. Afghanistan’s Taliban became in the late 2000s almost entirely dependent upon the cultivation of the poppy, prompting some to suggest that a policy of systematically eradicating the source of the opium trade would also end the insurgency. However, as a “starfish-type” organization, the Taliban could without much trouble transition to territorial control and tribute-­ extracting when their opium operations were disrupted (Schmidt, 2010, p. 77). In the same time, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a radical

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left-wing guerrilla group became a player in the cocaine trafficking in South America. Neither religion nor ideology oppose the use of what some may consider immoral means to achieve world-upending goals (Otis, 2014). Nor does direct trade with the enemy. Araucanian guerrillas fighting Spanish conquistadors in sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century Chile routinely engaged in commerce with the European soldiers, who did not hesitate to sell their weapons for food, sacrificing technological advantage to the imperatives of survival (De Armond, 1954, p. 131). Insurgent organization tends to closely mirror social patterns of a given area. A significant number of Arab lands had as defining characteristics tribalism and authoritarianism and guerrilla groups operating in these regions (stretching from Morocco into Iraq) tended to replicate these patterns. A strict hierarchy of power and trust marked the relations between the guerrilla groups and local communities, a reality that could prove extremely sensitive in areas of highly mixed populations, both in terms of tribal and religious affiliations (Thornton, 2007). In the case of Islamist AGs of the early decades of the twenty-first century, some noted that their organization is akin to a Middle Eastern patronage network, with the groups looking more like a tribal group, like organized crime “gangs” or like an extended family (Kilcullen, 2010, p. 183). This stands in stark contrast to earlier analysis of radical Islamist AGs such as Al Qaeda, of whom some analysts argued that, in order to function at a global level, it had to create a worldwide strategic framework of Islamist military and political organization (Gunaratna, 2002, p.  6; Tan, 2009, p. 178). Al Qaeda was successful up to a certain point by allowing its autonomous cells a significant degree of operational independence, while confining itself to guidance. The model was refined in the 2010s by Daesh, whose stronger territorial ambition however led to its collapse (Layton, 2015). Similar arguments have been brought forward by anthropologists working on contemporary AGs fighting in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. This perspective contends that modern adversaries of state-authorities in that vast region do not think in the Clausewitzian framework of war as a rational continuation of politics; rather, their form of warfare, organization and motivations are determined by the society and culture from which they come. The ethnographer approach should be adopted for a better appreciation of these AGs: culture matters, as their local communities rather than nation states are providing the structures of political life in such territories (McFate, 2005). In the most illustrative example, post-2003 tribal insurgency in Iraq was the result of a cultural misunderstanding: Bush administration officials believed the structure of government would remain intact after the fall of the Saddam regime following the US-led invasion. Instead, local authority reverted to the tribal structures and stayed with their sheiks, some of them choosing the path of armed rebellion and the formation of AGs (Burke, 2011; Galbraith, 2007). Decades earlier but mirroring these organizational patterns, Romanian anti-­ communist guerrillas of the 1940s and 1950s operated in small groups closely linked with their support network in their villages. Without the help of family, friends and lovers and without a clear knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies prevalent in a community, these AGs, controlling no territory except their mountain

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huts and being vastly outgunned and outmanned by governmental forces would not have lasted as long as they did (Miroiu, 2016). However, similar anti-communist AGs, such as those operating in Poland or the Soviet Union had much larger organizational charts than the scattered Romanian groups mentioned above. While the latter had a small, embryonic format, other underground networks were centralized. Those centralized (for instance OUN-B— Ukrainian Nationalists or the Polish Armija Krajowa) had a coherent strategy, infrastructure and control of their forces. The social composition of the anti-Communist guerrillas after 1944 in areas claimed by the Soviet Union featured mainly peasants usually coming from richer families, though the leaders still came from urban middle and lower middle class. Many former army and police officers headed the movements, comprising up to 47% in Lithuania. In Ukraine most of the leaders were professional revolutionaries from families of officers, teachers, craftsmen and priests. The core of the resistance was made by anti-Soviet groups already fighting in the wooded areas of the republic by the time of the reoccupation in 1944. Some of the AGs however, for instance those in the Baltic states, were fascist groups; in Latvia 120 guerrillas were German-trained former SS members (Statiev, 2010, p. 97, 98, 137). Early anti-Soviet and anti-communist guerrillas formed in Romania had also been paramilitary forces trained by the Germans in the arts of asymmetric warfare (Biddiscombe, 1993). Later Romanian groups, operating in the late 1940s and 1950s were to a significant extent composed and led by former members of the Iron Guard, a pro-fascist political movement boasting their own AGs in the 1930s. This provided the anti-communist AGs not only with military experience, but a cohesiveness and camaraderie that, to some extent, justifies their significant resilience (Dobrincu, 2006; Miroiu, 2016).

3.2.2  Operations Revolutionaries, rebels and insurgents vary enormously in the range of their operational options. Some may be linked entirely with symbolic or low-scale actions, without even doing harm to lives or property—such is the use of propaganda, for instance. At the higher end of the spectrum one finds, of course, military action in no way different from regular high-intensity warfare. During the Russian Civil War, Nestor Makhno’s AG, the Black Peasant Army roamed over hundreds of kilometres of Ukrainian soil with large units of mounted fusiliers and its own contribution to mobile warfare, the tachanka (a horse-drawn carriage mounted heavy machine-­ gun), in many ways a precursor of contemporary AGs’ truck-mounted heavy weaponry (Malet, 1982; Peters, 1970). Similarly, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists rose from humble guerrillas to a conventional army, looking increasingly like its Japanese and Chinese Nationalist’ opponents. This was in accordance with Mao’s desires, as he had earlier theorized that true victory for insurgent forces can be sought only in their transition from small AGs waging asymmetric warfare to army-type AGs engaging and defeating

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the enemy in pitched battles (Mao, 1961). This is seen by some authors as heralding a new era in revolutionary AGs’ approach to victory, confined mostly to the liberation movements begun in the period of decolonisation (Betz, 2010, p. 3726). The Maoist version of guerrilla warfare inspired (or was seen by Western analysts as inspiring) the actions of revolutionary AGs ranging from Vietnam and Cambodia to Oman, Algeria or Cuba. Successful insurgencies in these territories established sovereignty over a certain area and they started producing economic and military goods, as well as—most crucially—public services to the population, especially justice, transportation, and even postal services (Polk, 2009). Otherwise, the stock and trade of most AGs are sneak attacks, ambushes, strikes at small army and police units and posts, raids to procure food and weapons, “showing the flag” operations and the like. From the Huk rebels in the 1950s Phillipines to Jewish Zealots striking Roman occupying forces in first century Palestine, there was little change in this regard (Cross, 1964). Though not regularly, certain guerrilla AGs have been militarily strong enough to storm fixed positions of regular armed forces, but seldom were they able to keep them in the face of a resurgent, strong and vindictive government. This was a regular feature of the nineteenth century wars in the Caucasus between Russian imperial forces and the Murid sects (Allen & Muratoff, 2011). However, this is in most cases an extremely risky approach for forces that are not strong or able enough to transition to symmetric warfare against governmental forces. The Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf was initially a nationalist movement but then, after receiving training and indoctrination from Soviet and Chinese helpers, transitioned to a Marxist-Leninist AG determined to overthrow the monarchical Omani regime (Pimlott, 1985a, p. 29). While it clung to classical guerrilla operations, it posed serious trouble to its state opponents. After a premature move to conventional, pitched battles, the Omani army, helped by British special forces and Imperial Iranian forces easily defeated them in 1975 (DeVore, 2012). In their pursuit of victory, rebels and insurgents need to be mindful of the government’s ability to mobilise human and military resources that far outstrip their own. Indonesian-supported guerrillas of Borneo in the 1960s were confronted at the height of the insurgency with no less than 30,000 British troops, at a time when the United Kingdom had almost liquidated its colonial empire and was on the brink of retreating from East of Suez. But the political determination to win against rebels was strong enough to conduct the country’s largest operation since the Second World War (Tuck, 2004, p. 93). Yet another of the reasons guerrillas have to be measured in their operational choices is the always present possibility of governments responding with overwhelming force, not only against them but also against the civilian population that constitutes the rebels’ human base and support network. The history of “normal” states or even self-proclaimed revolutionary governments becoming highly repressive is long and infamous. In the years after the American War of Independence, United States’s federal troops immediately repressed a Pennsylvanian farmer’s rebellion against the urban moneyed interests perceived to be destroying their livelihoods (Bouton, 2000). French Revolutionary troops quenched in blood the Vendée

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in the 1790s, with the “infernal columns” slaughtering civilians that could have supported the Royalist AGs (Joes, 1998). Nazi troops fighting Soviet partisans in 1941–1944 behaved no better, routinely making the civilian population a target of their operations (Bartov, 1986). To respond to this possibility of outright governmental terror, rebel AGs sometimes choose the way of measured attacks against their targets, with the desire to inflict the smallest possible number of victims. The Russian Narodnaia Volia group of the 1870s and 1880s, a radical faction targeting the tsarist regime sought (unsuccessfully) to avoid repression by avowing that not a drop of innocent blood was be shed during its attacks; sometimes its fighters would abort their attack if they thought there may be innocent victims (children, including those of the targets) (Rindlisbacher, 2010; Hoffman, 2006, pp. 5–6). This type of moderation, however, is certainly rare, for many rebel groups have responded to what they perceive as authoritarian or governmental terror with their own acts of terror. Indeed, for statists the defining characteristic of terrorism is exactly the total disregard towards the laws of war (Hoffman, 2006, pp. 26–28), an argument they seldom apply to states. Another constraining factor for rebel AGs operational options is the ability of governments to organize forces best suited for their repression, recruited from among former rebel fighters who for one reason or another chose the side of the constituted authorities. The formation of “pseudo-gangs” of former guerrillas was essential for the success of many counterinsurgency campaigns. In Kenya’s 1950s Mau Mau rebellion, the British Police Special Branch used turncoats to infiltrate the guerrillas (Bailey, 2010). Despite the fact that the insurgency per se was the domain of the Army and the police, the intelligence services organized and ran as puppet-­ masters the pseudo-gangs in other colonial conflicts such as Malaya and Rhodesia (Kitson, 1971). A similar approach was used on a significant scale by the French authorities in their repression of Vietnamese or Algerian guerrillas, with varying degrees of success, but never so low that it ceased to be recommended by the major authors of counterinsurgency literature (Bendara, 2011, p. 182; Galula, 1964, p. 73). It is interesting to note how these repressive options easily transitioned across the Cold War divide. The Afghan Communist secret police used with some success counter-gangs against mujaheddin rebels during the Afghan War of 1979–1989 (Hughes, 2008, pp. 338–340). If they are patient enough though, rebel AGs can shape the forms of the conflict in their own terms, forcing governments to work in conditions and operational environments that are strange and unsuited to their armed forces. One reason insurgents and revolutionaries can do that is their possible control over time, by refusing to play in the terms of a revolution or victory that needs to be accomplished in a given timeframe. As Christophe Pasco (who was discussing modern rebellions but could have easily talked about revolutionary warfare in general) puts it, “[a]n insurgent organisation does not have the same time scale as the Western coalition. They can carry non-linear warfare, can wait and ‘lose time’ in order to reorganise, train troops and fight back as soon as the opportunity appears.” (Pasco, 2008) By doing this, insurgent AGs can gain a substantial advantage over their adversaries, perhaps more than by choosing adaptation to the enemy. While the Araucanians of Chile mirrored

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their Spanish opponents with an adoption of fortification, captured weapons, use of cavalry as well as the use of tactical changes, the key for preserving their autonomy for three centuries was the refusal of fighting in the same time-frame as their opponents (De Armond, 1954, p. 126). In the pursuit of victory, rebels can develop means to effectively disrupt the government troops’ communication networks and thus hamper their abilities to coordinate operations in the theatre. Fighting in an urban environment, Chechen rebels of the 1990s were able to penetrate the Russian telecommunications system and issue false orders to the troops (Dilegge & Konynenburg, 2002, p. 174). The same ability, particularly of modern, twenty-first century fighters, was noticed by David Kilcullen, who argued that globalization created an environment of shifting means and possibilities and the reaction to it creates an unprecedented category of opponents, ultra-­ savvy in technology, ideology and ability to move and strike different targets (Kilcullen, 2011, p. xv). Yet even these extremely savvy groups, much like the rebel AGs of old, still have to resort to classical, direct violence against governmental targets to achieve their aims. In the world of Al Qaeda or Daesh, one can still find classical examples of guerrilla warfare, such as the Indian Naxalite movement, whose regular operational choices include raiding police depots and pickets, as well as ambushes against governmental police and armed forces (Bhatia, 2006). In their operations inside Syria and Iraq, or the operations of its affiliates in Mali, Daesh has also employed traditional guerrilla tactics and even conventional warfare, as otherwise the aim of creating a territorial Caliphate would have been impossible to achieve.

3.2.3  Political-Ideological Armed Groups and Social Order Social order is at the core of what political-ideological AGs do and aim for. While from statists in general and supporters of established state-authorities in particular they are the main sources of the disturbance of order, if one looks at the world through their lenses or even from an outside vantage point, he/she cannot help but notice that they strike at an order only to establish their own brand of order. While some of these AGs, in particular those of a more anarchist bent have been accused of being nihilistic and promoting the dissolution of any order, even a cursory inspection of anarchist literature reveals that their goals were only the destruction of any authoritarian, non-consented order. The following paragraphs explore the way in which political-ideological groups approach, through violent means, social order. Most of this is done through irregular warfare, understood in conventional, statist literature as the use of violence by non-state AGs for the political purposes of achieving power, control and legitimacy, using unorthodox or unconventional approaches to warfare owing to their fundamental weakness in resources or capabilities (Kiras, 2008, p. 232). With this, political-ideological AGs may attempt to establish an internal monopoly on the use of armed force and a single central

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government, but, as previously mentioned, this need not be the main rebel goal (Heuser, 2010, p. 389). One of the trickiest points in which one could seek to make the connection between social order and the political-ideological AGs concerns actions of vigilantes. Indeed, vigilantes go systematically against established legal and political order and are impermanent enough to be fully interested in upending and superseding it permanently. However, they do act in defence of a more or less territorial and moral social order. This was the case, for instance, of the Algerian pieds noirs—white settlers of French, Italian, Spanish or Maltese origins. By the later stage of the 1954–1962 civil war and discontented by the actions of French governmental forces, some of the settlers established vigilante groups that routinely attacked Muslim civilians and even governmental police and armed forces, aiming to defend a social order based on European supremacy in the North African territory (Pimlott, 1985b, p.  62). Their action was such that they seriously disturbed government policy in Algeria and may have hastened the decision taken in Paris to negotiate independence with Algerian Arab nationalists (Corum, 2008, pp. 77–78). The same case of indiscriminate violence by vigilante-style AGs ultimately becoming a serious embarrassment for the state authorities was a characteristic of other colonial-era conflicts. During the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion of 1952–1954, white settlers established their own AGs inside the official Home Guard, delivering their own justice to rebels from the Kikuyu tribe (Branch, 2009). Eventually, they were strong enough to run military forts on their own, conducted interrogations, patrols and repelled attacks. They were also widely suspected to have taken part in torture, illegal imprisonment and executions. In this, they amplified to a vast extent the already violent campaign waged by the government against the rebels, featuring concentration camps, rape, torture and mandatory executions (Bennett, 2007; Elkins, 2005). The vigilantes had been supported by the government at the time, with their actions becoming problematic only decades later, when revealed by historians and lawyers working for the victims. Vigilantism of this type was encouraged beyond the Iron Curtain as well. In order to suppress resistance in the Western borderlands of the vast country (mostly the Baltic states, Byelorussia and Ukraine), the Soviet state also armed thousands of local peasants who fought the insurgents side by side with the regular forces of the Red Army and the ministry of the interior (Statiev, 2010, p. 209)). In this case, state and vigilante AGs cooperated in the creation of a commonly agreed social order. Part of the political-ideological AGs’ struggle for the creation of a new social order, more akin to the desires and interests of their members, also springs from the breakdown into poverty of regions and neighbourhoods of an existing polity. What pushes some to join “organised crime” AGs pushes others towards forming rebel groups (Salehyan, 2009). As Steven Metz argues, “in an even broader sense, contemporary insurgencies flow from systemic failures in the political, economic, and social realms. They arise not only from the failure or weakness of the state, but from more general flaws in cultural, social, and economic systems” (Metz, 2011, p. 22). Others, such as those in contemporary Nigeria, can arise from deep discontent stemming from economic pressure caused by the collusion between government and

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private economic actors, in that case powerful multi-national corporations (Shultz, Godson, Hanlon, & Ravich, 2011, p. 78). To combat these, political AGs can be created in some cases through robust urban social mobilization. Given social mobilization, urban insurgency emerges when security forces are politically constrained in their use of violence, opening a space for sustained violence of rebel AGs determined to forge through violence a new order (Staniland, 2010). Government forces could, of course, move back in force and attempt to recreate the state in its basic functions of providing security and basic social services, coupled or not with political reform that might (or might not) give a stake to citizens in the running of public affairs (Corum, 2007). A spiral of violence could then emerge between state and anti-governmental AGs, usually heightened by the ideological radicalism of both sides. The stronger the two sides feel about the moral and political basis of their proposed social orders, the more likely is that the conflict among them would be brutal and bloody. Such was the case of the Vendée during the French Revolution, when a government committed to the creation of an entirely new social and political order faced a simultaneously rural and aristocratic insurgency bent on preserving the ancien regime (Townshend, 1997, pp. 156–157). Theorists of revolutionary warfare of a Marxist inclination made clear that, in their case, the establishment of a specific political order was the main goal of creating revolutionary AGs. These groups would naturally progress, in the course of struggle, from guerrilla warfare to full-blown armies in order to ensure the complete victory of political ideals (Guevara, 1995, p. 30, 50). Statists and analysts close to statist positions could and did have a different take on the matter. As one of them would put it, thus mirroring views expressed by authors in matters concerning piracy and organised crime, from one point of view, guerrilla war and the formation of revolutionary AGs is a potent weapon, a sword of national liberation and social justice. From another perspective, it is a subversive and sinister process, nourished in the soil of social dissensions and causing armed fanatics to spring up where peaceful peasants once toiled (Faber, 1970, p. 17). More balanced authors noted that one of revolutionary AGs’ primary tasks in their struggle for a new order is to “create a politically salient identity, harness a compelling cause, create an effective sanctuary, and defeat both violent and peaceful organizational rivals, all while evading the police and security services of the much more powerful state.” (Byman, 2008, p. 167) Others, defending anarchist positions, have dismissed such views as nothing more than state fetishism, observing wryly that supporting the state against social and economic rebellion has more to do with seeking career-advancing opportunities than a commitment to scholarly truth (Gelderloos, 2017). One should also think about the fact that the creation of an identity is difficult, but it is even more complicated to create an identity that is opposed to the state/the neighbors/other groups with whom one used to live in peace. A case in point is the conflict raging for decades in Sahara and the South Sudan. Drought of the early and mid-1980’s pitted nomad cattle herders against settled villagers, both acquiring

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weapons and fighting over pasturage and water. Some of the early conflicts and guns acquired were related to the 1980’s campaigns of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi against Chad, provoking armed incursions of Chadian and French forces into Darfur. This conflict led to the creation of an ethnic ideology justifying the conflict by pitting “Arab” against “African” AGs (De Waal, 2004). But other rebel identities did not necessarily involve a recourse to ethnicity. They could have simply been based on social and economic opposition to regimes (such as post-colonial regimes in certain African countries) that failed to deliver public goods, to democratise government and to reform landholding. Politically driven AGs emerged, challenging postcolonial governments through violence and seeking to redraw economic and political order in favour of disaffected communities (Leonardi, 2007, p. 536). Another clear indication that for political-ideological AGs social order is of paramount importance stems from their constant efforts to ensure the provision of social services for the communities they plan to steer towards a different future. In the contemporary Middle East, Hezbollah and Hamas “blur the lines between state and non-state actor through direct involvement in governance. What is more, the way these actors govern similarly questions the dichotomy between state and non-state: none of these non-state AGs can be defined as applying a purely predatory and coercive model of governance.” (Berti, 2016, 16,089) In this, they mirror African and Central Asian warlords, who cement their authority by a significant provision of security and public goods for inhabitants of the territory under their control, thus transcending their status as fundamentally economic exploitative armed groups (Biro, 2010). Other AGs, such as those of Primea Linea, a 1970s Italian Marxist group, though aiming for a violent overthrow of the existing power structure and its replacement with a new social arrangement do at times just seek to liberate small areas of social life, be they territorial or not (Ruggiero, 2009, p. 714). In this, they foreshadowed the more peaceful approaches proposed in the following decades by anarchists such as Hakim Bey, by seeking to live in freedom right here and right now (Hakim Bey, 1991). Revolutionary, political AGs do not always need to strive for a distant achievement of their broader aims. The establishment of temporary or even permanent autonomous zones, such as the Zapatistas of Chiapas have achieved, is an entirely feasible and perhaps desirable goal. A condensed view on those AGs, be they political-ideological or economic exploitative such as the above one highlights the need to see these actors as fundamental for understanding the problem of social order just as much as those AGs that are serving state authorities. There is no intrinsic need to look at order as coming exclusively from a central, established point of reference. Indeed, there is not even an intrinsic need to think of order as unitary. Overlapping orders, particularly in reference to enforced social mores and to the redistribution of economic goods can exist within the same polity. An AG, be it supporting the state or opposed to it, is always making sure that this order or another one in the making has its backing.

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Chapter 4

Conclusions

Political theory has been rooted in reflections upon the state and its nature since its dawn. While larger topics such as authority and legitimacy were also present since the earliest of disputes, more often than not they were circumscribed to a statist way of thinking about the possible shapes of rules within constituted polities. Statists have also tried the impossible, which is to take the grand concept of liberty and try to argue that it is possible in a polity run by abstract, indirectly consented rules and mores. They have done that at the expense of eviscerating the concept to the point it is hardly recognisable and rendered as a necessity understood and accepted. The vantage point of anarchist political theory was always to reject this interpretation and to identify the state as the main culprit in the restriction of freedom. From this starts the preoccupation of anarchist theory with the problem of social order, as the state is the by-product of a more elaborated order. This work attempted an understanding of the role of armed groups in the shaping of social orders. Various things shape the functioning of a social order. Language, social mores, religious rites and rules, gender definitions and roles, economic patterns of production and exchange, visions concerning races (if any), agreements concerning the type of authority, rules for the selection of leaders are all fundamental for understanding how particular social orders exist and are transformed. However, one cannot explain the formation and the basic maintenance of social order through them. In virtually all constituted communities, with the possible (but not definite) exception of certain non-hierarchical hunter-gatherer, pastoralist and agriculturalist societies of old, social order was created, maintained, challenged and reversed by armed groups. It was the task of this book to set armed groups in the centre of political reflection on social order. For this to be feasible, the route taken could not have been only conceptual. The political theory of armed groups draws significantly from other fields of inquiry, in particular from history, anthropology and strategic studies. All these fields and subfields have provided support for a unified vision on armed groups as the actors explaining how order is formed, maintained and reversed.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Miroiu, Political Theory of Armed Groups, SpringerBriefs in Political Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51012-1_4

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4 Conclusions

In order to do that, a few things were attempted. Firstly, one had to argue convincingly that social orders are generated by the violence and threats of violence of armed groups. Secondly, a classification of armed groups was proposed, dividing them between permanent and impermanent and by the main reasons used to justify their use of violence. Armed groups were thus divided through the second criterion in economically exploitative armed groups and political-ideological armed groups. Thirdly, the work attempted a historical analysis of the links between social order and different armed groups, most of them operating on behalf of or seeking to establish state-like polities. Fourthly, the book contains a substantial discussion of mostly non-state armed groups through an analysis of their organisation, operations and connections with social orders. Here one debated the existence of parallel, perhaps concurrent or competitive social orders as well as issues connected with the reversal of order and the establishment of fragmented or overlapping orders. The purpose of this work has obviously been larger than just proposing a more thorough analysis of armed groups. Two other major goals underline this effort. The first was to consolidate a place within political theory for anarchist interpretations. The second and arguably the most important was to de-center the state from its preeminent place in political thinking. In this, I argue in favour of a substantial reset of political theory at large, one in which statist theories are held to intense and critical scrutiny. In case parts of them survive the process, they will have to be understood as subsidiary theoretical endeavors. Fundamental political theory should be concerning itself with actors and processes that pre-date the state, that do not need the state for their existence or continuation. Armed groups create more than states. They create, upheld and reverse social orders, sometimes overlapping within the same polity. The state is but an excrescence of certain types of social order. The pessimism of these conclusions for anarchist theory at large does not escape this author. They seem to point to the fact that outside of an improbable reversion towards a hunter-gatherer, loose pastoralist or agriculturalist lifestyle, order could not arise except under the sustained threat of violence by armed groups. For those inclined towards freedom, this could only mean that either these groups have to fall under the sway of an anarchist vision of politics and society, or the only possible freedom is within permanent or temporary anarchist autonomous zones. The first case is in the realm of possibility, as the Zapatistas of Chiapas and the land of Libertalia, however fictional, show us. The second depends on the imagination and the will of those who love freedom.