Suchergebnisse

This volume examines the phenomenon of paramilitarism across Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, offering a nuanced perspective while identifying key patterns in the way paramilitary violence is implicated in processes of capital accumulation, state-building, and the reproduction of social power. Paramilitary violence, a key modality of coercion in the era of globalization, has been pursued by states and dominant classes in the Global South, to reproduce or extend their power over subaltern groups. Paramilitary groups are responsible for atrocities including extra-judicial executions, disappearances, torture, rape, and forced displacement. The volume integrates empirically-rich investigations into an emergent theory of political violence, capturing the relationship between parastatal armed actors, capital, and the state. The analysis sheds light on globally relevant phenomena such as the end of the Cold War, the shifting role of US hegemony, and evolving nature of the nation-state. The volume is suitable for academics, graduate and upper-year undergraduate students, and policy-makers in development, human rights, and violence prevention. Given its interdisciplinary subject, it appeals to scholars from a wide range of disciplines including political science, sociology, political anthropology, development, peace and conflict, security and terrorism, international relations, and global studies.

This volume explains why the end of the Great War brought not peace but continued conflict. The book contributes to an understanding of the transition from war to peace and shows how paramilitary violence helped legitimize both fascism and communism, and also many of the new nation-states that emerged from the Great War

Examines the rise of right-wing citizen militia groups and armed anti-government groups, and various "anti-paramilitary laws" adopted by the states. Assesses threat potential and roles of conservatives, special interest groups, and the Republican party.

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out--with military precision--an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City. Returning to an America ripped apart by a war which, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and bearing future recruits. Belew's disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.--

"Freedom fighters. Guerrilla warriors. Soldiers of fortune. The many civil wars and rebellions against communist governments drew heavily from this cast of characters. Yet from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, Vietnam to Angola, Cuba to the Congo, the connections between these anticommunist groups have remained hazy and their coordination obscure. Yet as Kyle Burke reveals, these conflicts were the product of a rising movement that sought paramilitary action against communism worldwide. Tacking between the United States and many other countries, Burke offers an international history not only of the paramilitaries who started and waged small wars in the second half of the twentieth century but of conservatism in the Cold War era"--

This article addresses the causes and dynamics of spin-off violence by paramilitary groups that developed in Serbia in the early 1990s. It shows that some forms of violence that challenge the state's monopoly come into being due to decisions of state agencies. But delegated violence easily develops a life of its own, and therefore the decisions of state leaders are not the only variable, perhaps not even an important one, needed to explain the dynamics of violence once the turmoil of war has started. In retrospect, it seems as if warfare was just an episode in the political life of militias or the political groupings behind them. Violence was just one means among others in the fight for political chances. Therefore, the emergence and the life of these groups have to be explained as attempts of single political entrepreneurs to achieve the accumulation of power through the exertion of violence. Adapted from the source document.