Power and Comparative Methods: Performing the Worlds of Armed Conflicts

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue emphasises how power and power relations involved in establishing limits and boundaries to define, categorise and understand the world through comparison are intimately tied to conflict and intervention practices and dynamics. Indeed, when pundits, practitioners, academics and even conflict actors compare settings of armed conflict and intervention, they are participating in an inherently political move. The most off-handed of comments connect to assemblages that enable the production of categories and concepts from which it becomes difficult to think differently. Our comparisons perform worlds of armed conflict, and international interventions more often than not reflect those performances.

Making comparisons is no innocuous act. When pundits, practitioners, and academics compare settings of armed conflict and intervention, they are participating in an inherently political move. Of course, not all such political moves are equal in their consequences. It nevertheless remains the case that even the most off-handed of comments connect to material and ideational assemblages that enable the production of hegemonic categories and concepts from which it becomes difficult to think differently. Our comparisons perform worlds of armed conflict, and international interventions more often than not reflect those performances.

This Special Issue was borne out of frustrations over repeatedly hearing commentators and analysts compare the conflict in Mali to that of Afghanistan. As the Malian conflict escalated and calls for the need to combat jihadist terrorists were amplified by geopolitical actors, new terms such as ‘Sahelistan’ (Laurent 2013) and ‘Africanistan’ (Michailof 2015) began circulating unproblematically, and apolitically – and continue to do so now. Back in 2013, even the British Prime Minister compared the conflict in Mali to the so-called existential threat of terrorism in Afghanistan (BBC 2013). Dutch, German, Canadian, and some French and American interveners with whom we spoke during fieldwork, having worked in Afghanistan, felt very comfortable conflating the two countries’ conflict dynamics. African government officials likewise pursued this discursive trend – although perhaps for more strategic purposes than their intervener counterparts (see Bayart 2010, Fisher 2014). Others, due to isolated, albeit spectacular, drug seizures that occurred in Mali in the late 2000s, insisted that “lessons learned” and “best practices” developed in response to the armed conflict in Colombia could be used in desert regions like Kidal and Timbuktu in northern Mali.

The tendency to conflate conflicts in the Global South is, of course, understandable. International bureaucrats, soldiers, peacekeepers, capacity-builders, development workers, diplomats, and various other members of what Lombard (2016) calls ‘the good intentions crowd’ were all drawing on their previous experiences as a prism to understand and respond to the complexity of the situation of war and armed conflict facing them. Such easily made comparisons have become widespread, regardless of how inaccurate, deeply problematic, and dangerous they can be. Tuareg rebels and jihadist armed groups were not the Taliban. The political economy of northern Mali has little in common with that of Afghanistan. The warfighting and levels of violence were nowhere near the same scale, nor was international involvement (see Malejacq and Sandor 2017). Yet, for these actors, there was always a way to see the relevance of making these comparisons. Some pointed to the security-development nexus, to counterinsurgency lessons, to the complexity of local dynamics and so on (Charbonneau 2019a). Afghanistan constituted a point of reference for understanding a conflict that they did not fully comprehend. Comparison became useful for international actors to justify intervention and to translate complexity into familiar solutions and programmes.

The practice of making conflict comparisons was not limited to international actors or news networks. It was also used by conflict actors to buttress their political positions in negotiations, to consolidate their control over fighters, and as calls for transnational rebel solidarity. For instance, in Mali, members of the Coordination des Mouvements de l’Azawad (CMA) argued that the implementation of the 2015 Bamako Peace and Reconciliation Accords must include amnesty clauses and formal integration and forgiveness processes for fighters currently aligned with armed Islamist groups based on models used in conflict settlements in Algeria, Mauritania, and Pakistan. As early as 2012, members of the secessionist Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) used the example of South Sudan or Eritrea as evidence of the nobility of their cause and the possibility of victory to indoctrinate their fighters, to gain support from populations living in areas they attempted to control, or to convince foreign researchers.

Apart from debates undertaken in the field of Comparative Historical Sociology in the 1990s on the politics of the comparative method and the effects that (mis)uses of history can induce to either support idiosyncratic or general sociological theories of change (see Tilly 1984, Kiser and Hechter 1991, Calhoun 1998), few studies of political violence or international interventions have examined the political effects of comparing civil wars, armed conflicts and conflict management (see Cramer 2007, pp. 49–138). Of course, several researchers compare armed conflicts and international interventions. Quantitative studies that draw on large datasets, amassing together constant variables from a diversity of contexts over time, are arguably dominant in the study of civil wars. Qualitative approaches in the study of political violence and international interventions also tend to mobilise comparisons in order to advance institutional and thematic knowledge of these issues, in the hope that they will be useful for policymakers. In this Special Issue, we argue that the act of comparing, however, primes for the production of categories, which, when mobilised, shape conflict management policies themselves, and thereby alter the trajectories of the very conflicts being compared. In other words, among other effects, comparisons have the power to produce and prioritise technical knowledge for the purposes of intervention. While there are important epistemological and methodological stakes associated with researchers engaging in political comparison, there are also important productive effects connected to epistemological and methodological avenues taken. Given the political dynamism of spaces of conflict and intervention, and that practitioners regularly seek out academic expertise, it is time that researchers coming from diverse research traditions to discuss the possibilities, limits, and the productive effects of our methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding and comparing armed conflict and intervention.

The everyday comparative method is a common, even banal, way of understanding and navigating the world. Everyone does it. As a scientific endeavour, the art of comparison (Lane 1997) seeks, like other methods, to explain and understand the world. Comparing is intimately linked to practices of categorisation since the concepts and typologies that it creates are necessary for the comparative exercise. And yet, it is precisely in these practices of categorisation that the comparative method encounters its possibilities, its limits, and its productive effects: in drawing lines and boundaries between the objects to be compared, comparison makes implicit or explicit judgements on the nature of these objects. As this Special Issue emphasises, this yields profound political consequences.

Performing Comparison: Performing the World

The power and power relations involved in establishing limits and boundaries to define, categorise, and understand the world through comparison are core themes of this Special Issue. In a way, the scholar is faced with the dilemma that Florian Kühn (2019, in this issue) identifies in the thought of Simone de Beauvoir: individuals try to make sense of the world and their place in it while knowing that any and all such attempts at understanding will shape and change both. This dilemma is not grounded in, or limited to, the scholarly predicament. The foundations and institutional mechanisms of the modern political order established, and continue to form, perform and impose conceptual and theoretical limits and boundaries. These foundations shape the very questions we ask, while setting aside others as impossibilities.

The state constitutes one such categorical boundary. Drawing on Mitchell’s seminal work (1991), Jacob Mundy (2019, in this issue) identifies in his contribution on the production of the ‘Middle East’ as a political imaginary of violence how the political order established by the state produces distinctions between itself, society, and the international which generates power and resources that other forms of political order can hardly fathom. In comparing armed conflicts, in one way or another, the scholar faces the power of the state or, as Shapiro (2004, p. xi) put it, ‘the “cognitive imperialism” of a state-centric social science’. In many ways, the state evinces a powerful grid of intelligibility that influences how we understand levels and units of analysis, thereby rendering possible the comparative endeavour, which in return contributes to the cognitive hegemony and reproduction of the state. As Mandy Turner (2019, in this issue) demonstrates in her article, comparing can indeed be about the state imposing, or trying to impose, its understanding of the world and its place or primacy in it – or as Bruno Charbonneau (2019b, in this issue) argues, to create a space for international intervention. Yet, it is also about the power of the state as a concept, as a unit of analysis, as an intellectual framework which have become so common-sensical that to call them into question, or to suggest that it is not so much ‘how the world works’ but an effect of power relations, is to transgress all types of boundaries. The state remains the starting point of armed conflict comparisons, and most attempts at going beyond the state always seem to bring us back to it (Walker 2010). Combined, the articles of this Special Issue certainly demonstrate this effect quite clearly.

State-centric assumptions manifest themselves in empirical investigations and methodological choices made. One example is through the use of conflict data-sets. In his article, Will Reno (2019, this issue) challenges the use of statistical methods relying on large data sets, which require a universal concept of the state in order to make comparisons to study civil wars and to support their claims to generalisable knowledge. Broad comparisons based on large-set data must ignore the context from which the data emerged. An immediate effect is the disregard for different logics of warfare. For example, Reno argues that the concept of state collapse – albeit contested – remains useful to examine how civil wars occur and evolve. State collapse produces ‘a distinct context that shapes the uses of violence and the aims of important actors in these wars.’ In other words, the context of collapsed states is distinct enough to challenge the validity of statistical-based methods. The possibilities of civil war comparisons depend largely on the particular character of particular types of states at (civil) war. The specificity of the collapsed state setting signifies that their dynamics are different from the civil wars that oppose the state to rebel groups.

Reno’s analysis of the collapsed states in Mali, Somalia, and Iraq emphasises three common elements. First, strategies of regime protection undermine statebuilding efforts. To weaken the capacities of potential rivals for collective action, regimes empower non-state forces and subordinates by creating informal channels and networks separate from formal state institutions. The second element is a direct effect of the first: the systemic reliance on identity politics and what Reno calls ‘neo-tribes’ to consolidate and sustain the regime’s grip on power. Third, ‘neo-tribes’ and their informal channels become connected to global networks once placed beyond the control of the regime. For Reno, such political relations remain unseen by large comparative data sets.

The benefits of the comparative method come first from asking the right questions and establishing a sound starting point: in Reno’s case, the distinct logic of warfare of state collapse contexts. In her contribution, Róisín Read (2019, this issue) also emphasises the importance of context. She examines how comparative methods expunge key contextual knowledge when it comes to comparing sexual violence across conflicts or contexts. Unlike Reno, however, for Read the issue is not limited to methodology or the comparability of particular variables across time and space. Both quantitative and qualitative methods work in ways to efface the gender politics and relations inherent to sexual violence in conflict. Coding acts and events, as the building blocks of large data sets, require universal concepts to be organisable, measurable and ultimately useful to the bureaucratic mind. Yet, narrative and testimony-driven research also conjure up similar effects because it also requires a universal understanding of sexual violence in armed conflict in order to compare across countries and between cases. Moreover, the rise of evidence-based governance and thematic areas of international expertise are key to understanding how comparison can shape what we know about conflict-related sexual violence. By using categorised data, international public policy crowd comes to privilege technical over contextual knowledge because its expertise lends itself to transferability across countries, conflicts and contexts. In this way, ‘international best practices’, ‘benchmarking’ and other principles of the international policy trade translate into a cross-contextual coda that depersonalises histories and knowledges of armed conflict, sexual violence, interventions, and the like. Decision-making thus begins with a technocratic exercise that identifies what qualifies as valid knowledge in cases of war-time sexual violence as made possible by comparison and its power to obscure individualised contexts.

Read expertly illustrates and points to the politics of comparing conflict-related sexual violence that must be studied. Such an examination begins by interrogating definitions: what is sexual violence in armed conflict and who defines it? Defining the concept is unavoidably political. To define sexual violence is one, and to define it ‘in conflict’ is another. The latter implies that sexual violence can be carried out only by conflict actors, which excludes acts and structures of domestic violence, the exploitative acts of UN peacekeepers or humanitarians, and so on. Furthermore, it allows the claim that sexual violence is a weapon of war. All in all, the (political) need to define a universal understanding of conflict-related violence extracts it from gender relations and inequalities, while transforming it into an object of global governance.

Indeed, comparing can enable and enact the parameters of so-called 'appropriate' or 'tolerable' power relations. In her article, Mandy Turner (2019, this issue) dives right into the politics of comparative knowledge production. She is not so much concerned with where and how comparisons and their limits originate, but instead emphasises the need to analyse how metaphors and analogies are used politically, and how they sustain or challenge power relations. Turner argues that while the meaning-making effects of the comparative method are central aspects of our social reality, such effects do not constitute it. It is in analysing the truth-claims of metaphors and analogies that one can identify ‘whether domination or emancipation is the desired object and outcome of their application’.

Turner’s analysis is concerned with the political uses of analogies as a tactic of comparison in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. She focuses on two analogies. The first is the ‘Holocaust-Hitler’ analogy that Israel and its supporters deploy to portray the Israeli state ‘as a beleaguered nation surrounded by anti-Semitic, Nazi sympathisers who see to destroy it as the Jewish homeland’. Strategically mobilising this metaphor serves a dual purpose: to unite the nation against the ‘evil enemy’, and to build international support and silence critics. The second is the ‘apartheid analogy’. The predicament of the Palestinians is here compared to the victims of the racist, settler colonialism of the South African Apartheid regime. The comparison with South Africa is politically useful to make sense of the lived experiences of the Palestinian people. It also mobilises international support for the emancipation of Palestine and its people. Emphasising an analysis of who, and how, these analogies are enabled and enacted involves a research strategy that sheds light on the politics of comparing armed conflicts. In her article, conflict actors are the ones in the driver’s seat when it comes to making comparisons between the Israel-Palestine conflict and two ‘monstrous regimes’. The Israel-Palestine conflict context is a key case-study demonstrating how the practice of comparison is neither innocent nor without effects on conflict dynamics.

In turn, Bruno Charbonneau (2019b, this issue) builds on the critique of the state-centric comparative approach to demonstrate how comparing civil wars can graft itself the politics of international intervention. Conflict comparisons assume too much, or ignore too much, like the formation of prior political categories, imperial formations in particular. It is within the historical construction of a larger and largely ignored political context – called Francophone Africa – that comparisons are allowed between Francophone African states, and also between the Francophone African ‘world’ and other worlds. Charbonneau contends that the comparative method is an essential mode of knowing and being, but that its formal rules insisting on defining universal and static units of analysis cannot account for historical context. The proposed solution is ‘a research strategy that emphasises the need to reveal and historicise the relations and processes that form or perform the very units of comparative analysis’. Here, Charbonneau argues against the methodological nationalism that plagues the comparative study of civil wars. Instead of taking the state as the given object of history and comparison, its historical formation must be placed at the centre of the analysis. This is meant to avoid the naturalisation of the state, and thus to reveal its colonial legacies, the power relations that constitute it, and the pervasive ways by which the postcolonial state is conceived as an object of international intervention.

Hence, the possibilities of comparing Côte d’Ivoire and Mali require the prior analysis of their construction as state units that constitute the ‘world’ of Francophone Africa. Charbonneau’s analysis points to how ‘the (French) privileged sphere of intervention is inextricably tied to the historical production of a privileged sphere of comparison called Francophone Africa which is inherited from French imperialism’. Partly defined as ‘Francophone’, the Ivorian and Malian states are recognised as members of a privileged sphere, as locations that can be distinguished from other places, and thus as historical formations that ‘enable, enact and sustain a particular form of military intervention’, more often than not led by France, to the exclusion of other geopolitical actors.

Jacob Mundy (2019, this issue) works along similar lines, sharing a common concern with Charbonneau about the production of a ‘world’ that serves particular interests and powers. In Mundy’s case, he interrogates how and why the region called ‘Middle East’ is theorised as being prone to war, as emerging from and being reproduced by violent practices and processes. In fact, after showing that the region is no different than other regions, that it is no more and no less prone to war than other imagined geographies, he asks whether we need the idea of the Middle East at all. It is not clear what makes it a region, what its limits are, and what it is supposed to mean for thinking about war, conflict and intervention. For Mundy, there is a clear lack of theoretical engagement with the concept of region.

The answer lies elsewhere. He argues that regions are located at the nexus of the US academy and state power. Regions like the Middle East have served to strategize and to justify US hegemony. To ask, to suggest or to presume that the Middle East is more violent or prone to armed conflict is to assume that it has ‘properties that are ontologically deeper and temporally prior to that violence’. The idea of the Middle East is racialised, and intertwined with assumptions about the so-called violent character of its people and social institutions. Put another way, to compare the Middle East to other regions is partly a boundary problem – where does it start and end? It is also about the processes and power relations that gave rise and reproduced the idea – an idea that has ‘served to incorporate the Middle East within a global framework of political and economic relations underwriting and regenerating North Atlantic global supremacy’.

Indeed, this Special Issue repeatedly demonstrates how power relations and comparative methods are intrinsically linked, raising the question whether comparison is possible in the first place. Florian Kühn (2019, this issue) argues that comparing conflicts will activate normative positions or assumptions that ascribe meaning to the conflicts under the scrutiny of comparative practice. For Kühn, comparing is meaning and world-making as it assigns order and place, creates hierarchies, and performs normative boundaries. As a practice of knowledge production, the comparative method is useful to support claims to expertise, to policy-relevant insights, and to guide action.

Kühn is particularly interested in those intervention actors who practice, use and benefit from making conflict comparisons. He identifies an ‘intervention class’ as an epistemic community that, through its involvement in conflict intervention, uses its members’ experiences and perspectives to justify intervention, manage expectations, rewrite or erase history, categorise countries according to Eurocentric standards, and create their own authority as expert comparativists. Put another way, the intervention class does not merely create knowledge – no matter how accurate or biased – about the world, but establishes its own agency and its legitimacy as a conflict intervention actor.

Conclusion

The use of comparisons as a research method is valid, useful and at times powerful, but it is never innocent: comparing armed conflicts and interventions reproduces power relations and structures the very possibility of understanding the political world in either unquestioned or critical and transformational ways. Our Special Issue emphasises that there is always a prior or inherently political move before the comparison because of the necessity of having a beginning and of establishing the units of analysis under study. The problem of generalising armed conflicts obscures some context-specific conditions and dynamics when it highlights the similarities of others. In short, while comparing is closely linked to the theoretical and methodological possibilities of the comparative approach, it also constitutes a political move that orders and performs the social world. Hence, the practice of comparison has an impact on the production of scientific knowledge, on conflict dynamics themselves, and on the formulation and implementation of conflict management policy: comparison is inherently a practice of order-making.

Is comparison an exercise of domination and control? It can certainly be, as every article shows in its own way. Comparing to a ‘normal’ (Kühn), out of context (Reno), with quantitative methods (Read), or by putting a fence around a region (Mundy) are ways through which the comparative method can serve controlling and dominating agendas. Comparing can produce knowledge for and by the state (Charbonneau), which can banalise comparisons for purposes of instrumentalization by conflict actors (Turner). Comparing can sustain the will to increase the legibility and ability to discipline space and populations, the effacing of difference, the production of new, unintended actors and manifestations of self-fulfiling prophecy, and so on.

Does this mean that comparing armed conflicts is impossible or ill advised? Should we avoid it? Are our comparisons, in this issue, better than the ‘bad’ ones? These are questions that will be, and have been, raised, but they are traps. The issue is not about the possibility of comparison per se, because obviously no one will stop comparing armed conflicts. The issue is how comparisons make the transition into the world, how the abstract, conceptual, methodological, theoretical transform into practices or policies and how they affect power relations. Lots of things can get lost in comparing armed conflicts, and the canons of our disciplines often exacerbate the risks. Yet, as the contributions in this Special Issue argue, lots can also be learnt, especially if, instead of comparing armed conflicts per se, we emphasise comparing the processes, practices and relationships that constitute them as armed conflicts.

Acknowledgements

This Special Issue emerged from a workshop that aimed at unpacking the politics of comparing armed conflicts and their international responses. It was hosted by the Centre FrancoPaix in conflict resolution and peace missions, in Montreal on 13 October 2017. We want to thank all of our colleagues who contributed to the success of this special issue, whether in writing or at the Montreal workshop: Florian Kühn, Christian Leuprecht, Lotje de Vries, Jacob Mundy, Geneviève Parent, Róisín Read, Will Reno, Maxime Ricard, Mandy Turner and Marie-Joëlle Zahar. We also want to thank the staff of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand at the Université du Québec à Montréal for organising the workshop. The workshop was also made possible by two grants, one from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and another from the Canadian Defence Engagement Program. Adam Sandor thanks the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Centre for Global Co-operation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen which provided a stellar intellectual space for academic production and financial support, without which this work would have struggled to complete.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada’s Defence Engagement Program; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Bruno Charbonneau

Bruno Charbonneau is Associate Professor of International Studies, Royal Military College Saint-Jean, and director of the Centre FrancoPaix in Conflict Resolution and Peace Missions, Canada.

Adam Sandor

Adam Sandor is a Research Associate with the Centre FrancoPaix in conflict resolution and peace mission, Canada.