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CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Why States Choose Paramilitarism
by Ariel I. Ahram
In the summer of 2004, a new word entered Western dictionaries, drawn from colloquial Sudanese Arabic—Janjaweed, the devil-horsemen. It signified a phenomenon which suddenly caught the world’s attention: tribal militias rampaging through the Darfur region of northwestern Sudan, attacking villages and destroying the crops of agriculturalists, achieving a level of decimation that some observers called, without exaggeration, genocidal. While typically genocide is considered the domain of industrialized states capable of industrialized killing, the Janjaweed joined the Interhamwe of Rwanda, the Young Patriots of Cote D’Ivoire, and Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia on a growing list of paramilitaries to commit mass atrocities. While these militias are often seen as a symptom of state failure, this article will argue that they should instead be interpreted as a return to an earlier model of state-society relations in which local warlords, rather than being the state’s enemies, serve as its proxies, carrying out acts on the state’s behalf.
Paramilitaries and the Third World. The growing prominence of third-world paramilitaries brings into question the nature and function of states. Since decolonization, it has been widely assumed that new states would attempt to consolidate and centralize coercive forces into their regular army and police force. Sudan, however, is just one of a growing number of cases in which the state itself takes the initiative to establish, equip, and surreptitiously direct parttime militias, redistributing military might back to civilians. Unlike the regular army, which is accountable to the ministry of defense, militias operate outside the realm of state accountability. Why would third-world states, jealous guardians of what little military prerogatives they have accumulated, relinquish the means of repression to nonstate actors?
Paramilitaries are actors within a system of organizations called parainstitutionalism. Parainstitutions occupy the space between direct agents of state security, such as the military and police, who uphold the sovereignty of the national territory, and opposition groups, such as rebel guerrillas, who aim to subvert and seize that sovereignty. Parainstitutions share attributes of both the state and the rebels. They are loosely and semi-covertly affiliated with the state, often created, licensed, and dependent on state organs, though they are distinct from them. They undertake the acts of intimidation and elimination which the central government cannot or will not assume directly. In other words, they are “loyalist” militias who mimic the methods and organizational structure of rebel groups, but with opposing objectives: not to seize the state, but to supplement it. Parainstitutions are not limited to any one region, but have become common in a wide variety of states around the world, both authoritarian and democratic. Parainstitutional arrangements between the state and the state-sponsored militia can be found in Colombia, India, Indonesia, Burma, Tanzania, and Iran.
Lineages and Rationale of the Militia State. Militias developed simultaneously with modern standing armies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when they existed as an auxiliary and sometimes substitute force. Eying the Swiss cantons as a model, Jean-Jacque Rousseau envisioned self-defense platoons raised from local free men as an alternative to the hierarchical, professional, and autocratic army of Louis XIV. Clausewitz noted the effectiveness of the Spanish “people’s war”—which introduced the English to the word guerrilla— against Napoleon. Socialists from Marx and Engels to Jean Jaures have always been enamored of the possibility of replacing the armies and professional soldiers with more democratic ranks of citizen-worker- soldiers. Yet when Trotsky took control of the Soviet defenses, he had to abandon attempts to reorganize the Red Army into a territorial militia. While few states have been able to predicate their doctrines of national defense entirely on decentralized part-time paramilitaries or “people’s armies,” the effectiveness of such structures in the application of violence should not be underestimated.
Several factors favor paramilitaries over traditional militaries in handling low-intensity conflicts: their decentralized command structure, ability to use and apply local knowledge of conditions, and ability to innovate faster than the bureaucracy-bound regular army. Postcolonial states whose struggles for national liberation consisted of prolonged guerrilla wars tend to integrate militias as rear-guard insurgents against invaders and collaborators. Thus, regimes such as Mao’s China, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and both Sukarno and Suharto’s Indonesia created popular militias to guard against foreign infiltration and internal dissent. The fact that such forces are relatively cheap and flexible makes them attractive supplements to more thoroughly trained full-time soldiers, a strategy in evidence from Vietnam in the 1960s to Iraq today.
Ariel I. Ahram is a doctoral candidate in the departments of Government and Arab Studies at Georgetown University.