Devolution from above: the origins and persistence of state-sponsored militias

248 Pages·2008·1.36 MB·English

DEVOLUTION FROM ABOVE:
THE ORIGINS AND PERSISTENCE OF STATE-SPONSORED MILITIAS

A Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Government

By

Ariel I. Ahram, M.A.

Washington, DC
July 30, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Ariel I. Ahram
All Rights Reserved
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DEVOLUTION FROM ABOVE:
THE ORIGINS AND PERSISTENCE OF STATE-SPONSORED MILITIAS

Ariel I. Ahram, M.A.

Thesis Advisor: Andrew Bennett, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the proliferation of militias and other armed groups who act
in conjunction with, but outside, the state’s military apparatus. Groups like the Sudanese
janjaweed, the Serbian paramilitaries, and Colombian self-defense forces figure
prominently in a host of contemporary conflicts in the developing world. They are
widely identified as banes of human and international security and harbingers of anarchy.
Their very existence violates the Weberian ideal-type of the state as a monopolist over
the use of force. I argue, however, that reliance on non-state violence-wielders has been
a common form of military development and is not necessarily associated with state
failure.
I use small, medium, and large-n methods to develop a theory of how and why
developing states rely on non-state actors to implement coercion. Through historical case
studies of Indonesia and Iraq, regional comparisons of Southeast Asia and the Middle
East, and statistical analysis across eighty-five cases, I draw the following conclusions:
First, decolonization was a critical juncture that led states to adopt different techniques
for organizing coercion. Specifically, revolutionary states tended to decentralize coercive
power by assimilating former revolutionary fighters into informal local militias. In
contrast, non-revolutionary states directly inherited European-trained armies with more
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conventional, centralized organizational patterns that placed the use of force firmly in
state hands. Second, post-colonial conditions of regional competition compelled some
states to continually upgrade and centralize coercive power, while states facing weaker
external challengers could co-opt militias for counterinsurgency without needing direct
control over coercion.
By exploring the dynamics of state-militia relations and the historical and
structural factors that inhibit or enable the use of state-sponsored militias, I highlight the
futility of many efforts at state reconstruction aimed to regain the illusory monopoly over
coercion. The emergence of both centralized and decentralized institutions of violence
are responses to the international system and can scarcely be addressed through
piecemeal efforts at the country level. Rather, I suggest that violence devolution may
alleviate, rather than cause, some of the dangers commonly attributed to frail or failed
states.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people deserve acknowledgement for their sacrifices of time and energy on
my behalf in the past five years. Andy Bennett, my dissertation advisor, saw a first
proposal for the project in 2003 and was unwavering in both critique and encouragement
since then. Charles King, Jack Goldstone, and Debbie Avant read drafts at various stages
and gave me valuable feedback about ways to shape and hone the argument. Hillel
Frisch, Meyer Kestnbaum, and Sunil Dasgupta—specialists themselves in the subject of
militias—took an active interest in my work and gave me pointers about steering the
project through to completion. Among the Georgetown faculty, I thank Dan Brumberg,
Steve Heydemann, and Marc Howard particularly for introducing me to a realm of
research topics I would otherwise have overlooked. Equally important, my graduate
student colleagues, John Gledhill, Sara Wallace Goodman, Gabe Rubin, and Rachel
Templer, merit special thanks as my cohort and co-commiserators during the most
difficult months of writing.
My interest in the Middle East dates to my undergraduate training at Brandeis
University under Kanan Makiya and Yitzhak Nakash. Subsequently, I was lucky to
receive further guidance from Amatzia Baram, Phebe Marr, and Ken Pollack. A novice
and interloper in Southeast Asia, I am grateful to David Steinberg and Fred Von Der
Mehden from indulging and correcting me, as well as the staff of the Sudirman Museum
in Yogyakarta and Museum Proklamasi in Jakarta for their patience and assistance.
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George Shambaugh and Mike Bailey lent me important advice about the statistical
analysis. Errors in any portion of the work are mine, not theirs.
The project benefited from a number of sources of institutional support, notably
the Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, the Boren National Security
Education Program, Georgetown University Graduate School, and the Center for
Democracy and Civil Society. It was strengthened by the opportunity to present at the
Institute for Qualitative Methods Research, American Political Science Association,
International Studies Association, Midwest Political Science Association, Social Science
History Association, Georgetown Working Group on Internal Security, Culture and
World Politics Workshop, and the DC Workshop on Contentious Politics. I also thank
the staff of the Georgetown University Library, the Africa and Middle East Reading
Room at the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Record Administration
in College Park, Maryland, for their assistance.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge a number of people outside the academia whose
role was no less important to my success. Joe Neumann has buoyed me in my hardest
time in graduate school and every day since then. Jacob Ebin, Kathryn Hinkle, and Jason
Kohn served variously as inspirations, exemplars, and sounding boards. Throughout my
life, my mother, Judi, brother, Roey, and sister, Sharon, were steadfast in their support. I
can only hope I was the same for them. Finally, I thank my fiancé, Marni Lefkowitz,
whose companionship during the last year turned the most daunting part of my education
into the most exciting and wonderful one as well.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction .................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 2: A Theory of Violence Devolution …………………………………...…….13
Chapter 3: Limited Wars and Limited States: Violence Devolution in
Indonesia………………………………………………………………………………... 43
Chapter 4: Oversized Wars and Overgrown States: Building the Garrison State in
Iraq…………………………………………………………………………………….. 111
Chapter 5: Wider Perspectives on Revolution, War, and Military Development……. 197
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Distant Battles, Historical Pathways, and the Future of Violence
Devolution………………………………………………………………………………224
Appendix A: Type and Intensity of Conflict of Time: Middle East vs. Southeast
Asia……………………………………………………………………………………..241
Appendix B: Variable Descriptions……………………………..………….………….244
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List of Figure and Tables
Figures
Figure 2.1: Continuum in the Organization of Violence………………………………..14
Figure 2.2: Conceptual Map of Violence Devolution…………………………………...15
Figure 2.3: M-form Military Organization……………………………………………...22
Figure 2.4: U-form Military Organization………………………………………………22
Figure 2.5: Militia Mobilization with Competing Sources of Clientage and
Brokerage………………………………………………………………………………...27
Figure 2.6: Militia Mobilization with Limited Clientage and Brokerage……………….27
Figure 2.7: Pathways of Late Developing State Military Development………………...37
Figure 3.1: Location of Major Internal Uprisings in the Late 1950s……………………85
Figure 5.1: Pathways of Military Development Compared: Iraq and Indonesia………199
Figure 5.2: Military Budgets as Percentage of Government Expenditure, 1960s-
1990s……………………………………………………………………………………203

Tables
Table 1.1: Conflict by Type and Region, 1945-2006 (Tally and Crosstab by Row)……7
Table 1.2: Military Spending Among LDSs, 1999……………………………………….8
Table 2.1: Comparison Between U-form and M-form Governance………………….…23
Table 4.1: Changes in the Size of the Iraqi Military…………………………………...113
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Table 5.1: Military Expenditure as a Percentage of Central Government
Expenditure……………………………………………………………………………..202
Table 5.2: Growth in Military Size of Selected Middle Eastern
Countries………………………………………………………………………………..209
Table 5.3a: Multivariate Regression Using Robust Standard Error for PARAMILITARY
(Model includes major conflicts only)………………………………………………….221
Table 5.3b: Multivariate Regression Using Robust Standard Error for PARAMILITARY
(Models includes all conflicts)………………………………………………………….222
Table 6.1: Types of International Engagement in Frail States…………………………230
Appendix A: Type and Intensity of Conflict of Time: Middle East vs. Southeast
Asia……………………………………………………………………………………..240
Appendix B: Variable Descriptions……………………………………………………243

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Chapter 1
Introduction
In 2003, a new word entered Western parlance, drawn from colloquial Sudanese
Arabic—janjaweed (devil-horsemen). The term connoted a phenomenon that seemed
suddenly to catch the world’s attention: nomadic tribal bands rampaging through Sudan’s
Darfur region, attacking villages and destroying the crops of the sedentary population.
Despite protestations by the Sudanese Defense Minister that they are nothing but “gangs
of armed bandits” whom the government is unfortunately powerless to stop, the United
Nations commission of inquiry has well-documented the way the janjaweed is a “militia
acting, under the authority, with the support, complicity or tolerance of the Sudanese
State authorities, and who benefit from impunity for their actions.”1
Groups like these are becoming ever more typical in contemporary warfare, which
Mary Kaldor observes tends to involve a host of “paramilitary units, local warlords,
criminal gangs, police forces, mercenary groups, and also regular armies including break
away units” each “operat[ing] through a mixture of confrontation and cooperation even
when on opposing sides.”2 Concurrently, John Mueller and Martin Van Creveld argue
that conventional armies are moving toward obsolescence and that today’s conflicts are
mostly carried out by a sundry mix of thugs whose allegiances to the state and adherence

1 Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General,
Geneva, January 25, 2005. http://www.un.org/News/dh/sudan/com_inq_darfur.pdf (Accessed March 19,
2007); Usman A. Tar, “The Perverse Manifestations of Civil Militias in Africa: Evidence from Western
Sudan,” Peace, Conflict, and Development, 7 (2005).
2 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organizing Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999 [2007]), 9.
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