Origins and Persistence of State-Sponsored Militias: Path Dependent Processes in Third World Military Development

Abstract

This article uses a sequential mixed method approach to examine the origins and persistence of paramilitaries and state-sponsored militias in the developing world. Combining comparative case studies of Southeast Asia and the Middle East with statistical analysis, it shows that revolutionary decolonization produces more decentralized and localized force structures, while direct inheritance of colonial armies leads to more conventional force structures. Subsequently, the level of competition within the regional system influences whether a state can persist in the use of paramilitaries or must transition to a more centralized, conventional force.

Key Words:

• Militias
• Middle East
• Southeast Asia

Notes

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³Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1977), 15.

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⁶Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing World, 13.

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⁹J.C. Hurewitz, Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York: Praeger 1968), 47–64; Lawrence Pratt, ‘The Strategic Context: British Policy in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1936–1939’, in Uriel Dann (ed.), The Great Powers in the Middle East (London: Holmes & Meier 1988).

¹⁰On Jordan, see P.J. Vatikiotis, Politics and the Military in Jordan (London: Frank Cass 1967); on Egypt, see ‘Abd al-Wahhab Bakr Muhammed, Al-Wujud al-Britani fi'l Jaysh al-Misri, 1936–1946 [The British Presence in the Egyptian Army, 1936–1946] (Cairo: Dar al-Ma'ruf 1982); on Israel, see Martin van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Forces (New York: Public Affairs 2002), 47–9; on Iraq, see Raja Khattab, Ta'sis al-Jaysh al-‘Iraqi wa-tatawwur dawrihi al-siyasis min 1921–1941 [The Establishment of the Iraqi Army and the Development of its Political Role, 1921–1941] (Baghdad: Baghdad Univ. College of Arts 1979); on Syria, see Joshua Landis, ‘Syria and the Palestine War: Fighting King Abdullah's “Greater Syria Plan”', in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War in Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (New York: Cambridge UP 2001).

¹¹Amitzur Ilan, The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Arms Race: Arms, Embargo, Military Power and Decision in the 1948 Palestine War (New York: New York UP 1996); David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: Strategy and Diplomacy (New York: Routledge 2004), 157–65.

¹²Avi Shlaim, ‘The Rise and Fall of the All-Palestine Government in Gaza’, Journal of Palestine Studies 20/1 (1990), 37–53; Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Palestinians and 1948: the Underlying Causes of Failure’, in Rogan and Shlaim (eds), The War in Palestine.

¹³Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies 1997).

¹⁴Avi Plascow, The Palestinian Refugees in Jordan, 1948–1957 (Totowa, NJ: Transaction Press 1981), ch. 5.

¹⁵Mehran Kamrava, ‘Military Professionalization and Civil-Military Relations in the Middle East’, Political Science Quarterly 115/1 (2000), 82–4.

¹⁶Fred Lawson, Why Syria Goes to War: Thirty Years of Confrontation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1996), 42–51.

¹⁷See Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements in Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1978), Book 3; Uriel Dann, Iraq Under Qassem: A Political History, 1958–1963 (New York: Praeger 1969).

¹⁸Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press 2002), 201–8.

¹⁹James T. Quinlivian, ‘Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East’, International Security 24/2 (1999), 131–65.

²⁰Pollack, Arabs at War, 219, 490, 523.

²¹Cited in Kenneth Katzman, The Warriors of Islam: Iran's Revolutionary Guard (Boulder, CO: Westview 1993), 85.

²²Katzman, Warriors of Islam, 85–9; Sepehr Zabih, The Iranian Military in Revolution and War (London: Routledge 1988).

²³Michael Brzoska and Thomas Ohlson, Arms Transfers to the Third World, 1971–88 (New York: Oxford UP 1987).

²⁴Michael Eisenstadt and Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘Armies of Snow and Armies of Sand: The Impact of Soviet Military Doctrine on Arab Militaries’, Middle East Journal 55/4 (2001), 549–78.

²⁵Milton E. Osbourne, Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia (New York: Penguin 1971); Christopher Bayl and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 2007).

²⁶Joyce C. Lebra, Japanese-trained Armies in Southeast Asia: Independence and Volunteer Forces in World War II (New York: Columbia UP 1977); Abu Talib Ahmad, ‘The Impact of the Japanese Occupation on Colonial and Anti-Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia,’ in Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig (eds), Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge 2006).

²⁷Robert Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries: the Jakarta People's Militia and the Indonesian Revolution (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press 1991); Benedict Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1972).

²⁸Robert Cribb, ‘Military Strategy in the Indonesian Revolution: Nasution's Concept of “Total People's War” in Theory and Practice’, War & Society 19/2 (2001), 774–85; Adrian Vickers, ‘Reopening Old Wounds: Bali and the Indonesian Killings: A Review Article’, Journal of Asian Studies 57/3 (1998), 774–85.

²⁹Geoffrey Robinson, Dark Side of Paradise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1995), 296.

³⁰Mary Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2003); Josef Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1977).

³¹Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1988), 71–5; J.A.C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: the Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute, 1963–1966 (New York: Oxford UP 1974), 210–15, 259–60.

³²Matthew Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States, and the Creation of Malaysia (New York: Cambridge UP 2002); Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Indonesia in ASEAN: Foreign Policy and Regionalism (New York: St Martin's 1994), 18–19.

³³Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (New York: Cambridge UP 2001).

³⁴William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954–1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview 1986), 170; Edward R. Rice, War of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1988), 81–2; Thaveeporn Vasavakul, ‘Vietnam: From Revolutionary Heroes to Red Entrepreneurs’, in Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Coercion and Governance: The Declining Political Role of the Military in Asia (Stanford UP 2001).

³⁵For an overview, see Benedict Anderson (ed.), Violence and the State in Suharto's Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asian Program, Cornell Univ. 2001).

³⁶Tim Huxley, Disintegrating Indonesia? Implications for Regional Security (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies 2002); Ian Douglas Wilson, ‘Continuity and Change: The Changing Contours of Organized Violence in Post-New Order Indonesia’, Critical Asian Studies 38/2 (2006), 265–97; Romain Bertrand, ‘“Behave Like Enraged Lions”: Civil Militias, the Army, and the Criminalisation of Politics in Indonesia’, Global Crime 6/3–4 (2004), 325–44.

³⁷Federico Ferrara, ‘Why Regimes Create Disorder: Hobbes’ Dilemma During a Rangoon Summer’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 47/3 (2003), 302–25; Crackdown: Repression of the 2007 Popular Protests in Burma (Washington DC: Human Rights Watch Dec. 2007), 105–11; David I. Steinberg, Burma: the State of Myanmar (Washington DC: Georgetown UP 2001), 108–15.

³⁸Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1994), 297; Shelby Tucker, Among Insurgents: A Walk Through Burma (New York: I.B. Tauris 2001), 331.

³⁹Eva-Lotta Hedman, ‘State of Siege: Political Violence and Vigilante Mobilization in the Philippines,’ in Bruce Campbell and Arthur Brenner (eds), Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder With Deniability (New York: St Martin's 2000); David Kowalewski, ‘Counterinsurgent Paramilitarism: A Philippines Case Study’, Journal of Peace Research 29/1 (1992), 71–84; Justus M. van der Kroef, ‘The Philippines: Day of the Vigilantes’, Asian Survey 28/2 (1988), 630–49.

⁴⁰Shaun Narine, ‘ASEAN and the Management of Regional Security’, Pacific Affairs 71/2 (1998), 195–214; Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (New York: Routlege 2001).

⁴¹Eliot Cohen, ‘Distant Battles: Modern War in the Third World,’ International Security 10/4 (1986), 143–171; Bertrand M. Roehner and Tony Syme, Pattern and Repertoire in History (Cambridge: Harvard UP 2002), 22–3; Jeremy Black, ‘Military Organization and Military Change in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Military History 62/4 (1998), 871–93.

⁴²Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge UP 2006).

⁴³Claude Welch, ‘Continuity and Discontinuity in African Military Organisation’, Journal of Modern African Studies 13/2 (1975), 229–48.

⁴⁴Sunil Dasgupta, ‘Paramilitary Forces and Security Reorganization’, GSC Quarterly 12 (2004), np.

⁴⁵Nils Peter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margaret Sollenberg, and Havard Strand, ‘Armed Conflict 1946–2001: A New Dataset’, Journal of Peace Research 39/5 (2001), 615–37. When a state is involved in an internationalized internal conflict in its own territory, I code it as internal, when it is involved in such a conflict outside its own territory, I code it as external.

⁴⁶I add a control dummy for Latin American states, whose decolonization preceded the scope of the dataset.

⁴⁷James Fearon and David Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review 97/1 (2003), 75–90.

⁴⁸Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton UP 1988); Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1980).

⁴⁹Hillel Frisch, ‘Why Monarchy Persists: Balancing Between Internal and External Threat’, paper presented at the Workshop on Contentious Politics, Univ. of Maryland, 2006.

⁵⁰Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (New York: Cambridge UP 1986), 11.

⁵¹For exemplary studies of this vein, see Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton UP 2000); Miguel A. Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (Univ. Park: Pennsylvania State UP 2002); Christoph Zürcher, The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus (New York: New York UP 2007).