The New Dogs of War

Nonstate Actor Violence in International Politics

Ward Thomas

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501758898
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501758904
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

As Ward Thomas details in The New Dogs of War, militias and paramilitary groups wield greater power than national governments in many countries, while in some war zones private contractors perform missions previously reserved for uniformed troops. Most ominously, terrorist organizations with global reach have come to define the security landscape for even the most powerful nations. Across the first decades of the twenty-first century we have witnessed a dramatic rise in the use of military force by these nonstate actors in ways that have impacted the international system, leading Thomas to undertake this valuable assessment of the state of play at this critical moment.

To understand the spread of nonstate violence, Thomas focuses on the crucial role played by an epochal transformation in international norms. Since the eighteenth century, the Westphalian model of sovereignty has reserved the legitimate use of force to states. Thomas argues that normative changes in the decades after World War II produced a "crisis of coherence" for formal and informal rules against nonstate violence. In detailed case studies of nonstate militias, transnational terrorist networks, and private military contractors, Thomas explains how forces contesting state prerogatives exploited this crisis, which in turn reshaped international understandings of who could legitimately use force. By considering for the first time all three purveyors of nonstate violence as aspects of the same phenomenon, The New Dogs of War explains this fundamental shift in the norm that for centuries gave states the monopoly on military force.

1

THE FALL AND RISE OF NONSTATE VIOLENCE

State sovereignty is not what it used to be. Although states are not on the verge of extinction, the classical Westphalian model—unitary government with a monopoly on violence and dominion over its territory—is clearly on the wane. Observers of globalization have noted the increasing permeability of state borders and the prevalence of transnational economic and cultural forces.1 Similarly, global governance scholars have highlighted the ways in which institutions other than states decisively shape many aspects of life in the twenty-first century.2 Many have seen the declining power of the state as a positive development, celebrating the success of international activism, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational civil society in changing state practices in the fields of human rights, arms control, and environmental protection, among others.3 Moreover, scholars, activists, and even many states themselves have heralded the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine as a welcome refinement, if not a redefinition, of global norms about what sovereignty entails.4

Not all manifestations of the decline of sovereignty, however, are beneficial. One of the most significant, and potentially alarming, is the erosion of the state monopoly on transnational violence. To a greater degree than at any time in generations, actors other than states are using military force in ways that impact the international system. These actors fit varying descriptions, from the nefarious to the respectable. On one end of the spectrum are transnational terrorist networks, which have become a central subject of international concern since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Almost as menacing are nonstate militias and paramilitary groups, which have played a significant role in almost every conflict since the end of the Cold War, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, and Syria. More respectable but still often problematic are private military and security companies (PMSCs), which provide military and military-related services to clients ranging from NGOs and corporations to states as large and capable as the United States (which has employed PMSCs extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Russia (which has used them in a combat capacity in Ukraine and Syria).5

This book examines this dramatic growth in nonstate actor violence, focusing on the crucial role played in this trend by changes in international norms. The most commonly cited definition of the state is the one devised by Max Weber over a century ago: “the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly on legitimate physical violence.”6 Although many commentators overlook it, the word “legitimate” here is not an afterthought. When states consolidated their dominant institutional status by forging a monopoly on the means of transnational violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they did so not simply through the exercise of material power but also through the construction of norms about what constituted the legitimate use of force.7 These norms, indeed, were at the heart of the classical Westphalian model of state sovereignty and helped to anchor sovereign states in a privileged position as the central constitutive actors in the international system.8 The recent prominence of nonstate militias, transnational terrorist networks, and the private military and security industry therefore represents a transformation that is both portentous and puzzling. While one would expect states to zealously defend the norms assuring their monopoly on legitimate violence, in some cases they seem complicit in contributing to its erosion. Not only do many states employ PMSCs, but a number have also aligned themselves with less reputable actors, including militias and terrorist organizations. While “terrorism” per se is still widely condemned, there is a sobering lack of global consensus about who is a terrorist and who is not, and methods long condemned as barbaric are sometimes defended as morally acceptable.9 In contemporary international politics, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of any particular group increasingly hinges on its political goals, whereas in past generations the very use of force itself by a nonstate actor would be deemed illegitimate.

In the following chapters, I tackle this puzzle, trying to understand the rise of nonstate violence by bringing attention back to the word “legitimate” in Weber’s definition. In doing so, I address the question of how to explain the relatively rapid decline of the norm against actors other than states using military force—a norm that once resided at the conceptual core of the sovereign states system.

Nonstate Violence Makes a Comeback

International politics was once rife with military entrepreneurs, private armies, and other forces unaffiliated with national governments. After the Westphalian revolution of the 1600s, however, newly powerful sovereign states eventually came to view such actors as threats to international order and by the early nineteenth century had largely driven them out of business.10 What is not always appreciated is that this was accomplished not just through greater material resources and military power but also through the restructuring of norms.11 What was important, in other words, was not simply that nonstate actors lacked the material means to use interstate violence (indeed, this was often not the case) but that there was a powerful international consensus that doing so would be illegitimate. Therefore, one of the most significant sources of state power was not material but ideational, resting on norms held throughout the international system. To be sure, as some scholars have noted, reality was frequently less tidy than the Westphalian model would suggest. States’ control over their territories has rarely been absolute, and nonstate actor violence has never been entirely absent.12 Nevertheless, there was more to the state’s “monopoly on force” than merely wishful thinking. Large-scale institutional challengers did in fact recede nearly into irrelevance, and armed nonstate actors tended to be contained within domestic, or more often colonial, contexts.13

What has occurred in the past several decades constitutes a significant change in both the frequency with which nonstate actors use force and the scale on which they use it. One widely cited measure of this is that interstate war—the classic model of conflict that undergirds much international law, as well as most military doctrine—has become rare, while intrastate war is common.14 Fifty-one of the sixty-nine armed conflicts active in 2018 were non-international, and almost all eighteen of the international conflicts involved nonstate actors to some degree.15 Furthermore, armed nonstate groups are responsible for more “nonwar” violent deaths each year than violent deaths in interstate and intrastate war combined.16 While most such groups are small, some number into the tens of thousands. Many, moreover, are shockingly well armed; as of 2014, over sixty reportedly possessed guided weapons capable of bringing down military aircraft or civilian airliners.17 Armed nonstate groups pose significant threats not only to the security of governments but to human security as well, often systematically targeting civilians and committing a broad range of human rights abuses.18 Another telling sign is that the most powerful countries in the world regard groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as high-level security threats.19 An expert roundtable convened by Harvard’s Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (PHPCR) concluded that “these actors, once viewed as merely prospective subjects of the criminal justice system, . . . have come to overwhelmingly fight the wars of the twenty-first century.”20 Beyond their number and scale, contemporary violent nonstate actors represent a departure from the past in the degree to which their existence has been accepted and sometimes even supported by other types of actors in the international system. As noted, many states have backed nongovernmental forces whose goals coincided with their own, and a growing number use private contractors to pursue their foreign policy interests. Some nonstate groups have had their right to use force endorsed by the United Nations, some have been deemed to possess the same rights under international law as uniformed militaries (and allowed to participate in making that law), and some have been granted observer status at the UN and other international bodies.21 And while few defend terrorism as such, almost every group accused of terrorism by some states can find others willing to defend it against those accusations. In short, nonstate actor violence has acquired, in some forms and in some settings, considerable legitimacy.

Categorizing nonstate actor violence can be tricky. Distinctions among types of organization can be blurry and arbitrary, with overlaps among categories common. For example, Phil Williams identifies six types of violent nonstate actors: warlords, militias, paramilitary forces, insurgencies, terrorist organizations, and criminal organizations and youth gangs.22 Although he differentiates among them using various criteria (including their motivation, whether they control territory, their relationship to the state, whether they are led by a charismatic individual, and whether they provide governance or social welfare services), Williams acknowledges that some organizations could be placed in more than one category or in different categories at different times.23 Similar problems are evident throughout the literature on nonstate actors.24 A related difficulty is that the categories themselves are often contested, especially those that carry moral connotations. This is notoriously the case when it comes to labeling an organization as “terrorist,” for reasons I explain in chapter 4, but is also crucial in the PMSC case, as private purveyors of military and security services have tried to distance themselves from the stigma associated with “mercenaries.” Indeed, the contestation of these categories is an important part of the story I tell in this book and helps to explain both the multiplicity of terms sometimes used to refer to violent nonstate actors and the stakes involved in this choice of terminology.

Examples abound of the challenges of labeling nonstate groups. Lebanon-based Hezbollah, for instance, is a nonstate organization that has many of the characteristics of a conventional military force—one that by some accounts is more powerful than the Lebanese army.25 It is designated as a terrorist organization by most Western states and the Arab League, while many other countries regard it as a legitimate national resistance movement. It functions as a political party within Lebanon, holding over 10 percent of the seats in parliament and playing an influential role in the ruling coalition, but also carries out its own foreign policy, such as sending forces to fight for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war.26 And while it claims no sovereign territory, it provides extensive social and public order services in southern Lebanon, running schools, hospitals, utilities, and construction projects. Similar in many ways is the Palestinian group Hamas, condemned as a terrorist organization by many Western states but which has served as the de facto governing authority in the territory of Gaza since 2006, when it won a majority on the Palestinian Legislative Council. A different sort of example of ambiguity in categorizing armed nonstate actors was the September 2012 militant attack on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, including two private contractors working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). There was a Libyan security detail assigned to protect the facility, of which half were contractors employed by a British PMSC and half were members of an organization called the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, an Islamist militia with close ties to the Libyan government.27 If the Hezbollah and Hamas cases illustrate the elusiveness of a bright line between militias and terrorists, the role of the February 17 group in the Benghazi case shows that the line between private contractors and militias can also sometimes be muddled. All three cases, moreover, speak generally to the growing prevalence of nonstate actors in roles traditionally associated with states.

In this study, I consider militias and paramilitaries together in a somewhat generic category of armed nonstate groups. Some scholars use “militia” to refer only to progovernment groups, but there are limitations to this approach, as the degree of cooperation with the state is sometimes unclear and can change quickly.28 I therefore do not distinguish among groups on this basis, whether they operate as de facto adjuncts of the state or are in open rebellion against it. In either case, it is hard to overstate the significance of these groups in contemporary international politics. They have been involved in every armed conflict in the twenty-first century, and some are stronger than the national armies in states where they operate. Such forces fought both alongside and against American troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where militias contributed to the horrific sectarian violence that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein but also assisted US and Iraqi government forces during the Anbar Awakening starting in 2006. In Libya they played a key role both in overthrowing Moammar Qaddafi in 2011 and in fomenting the chaos that has ensued there since.29 In the form of the Kurdish Peshmerga and People’s Protection Union (YPG), they were the United States’ primary partner in ground operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. They have made their presence felt in Europe as well. Militias and paramilitary forces were key belligerents in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) was pivotal in Kosovo gaining its independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—assisted by the 1999 air campaign of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They have fought on both sides of the conflict in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and have formed in other Eastern European states in response to the prospect of Russian aggression.30

Transnational terrorism is the type of nonstate actor violence that has gotten the most attention and provoked the most concern. The al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, immediately reconfigured US foreign policy, which has in turn reconfigured significant parts of the Middle East and Southwest Asia, as well as relations between the Islamic and Western worlds. Subsequent operations by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Europe, Asia, and Africa further demonstrated the reach of the organization. The apotheosis of transnational terrorism in the twenty-first century, however, may have been the ascendance of ISIS, an offshoot of al-Qaeda that seized large areas of eastern Syria and western Iraq in which it declared a caliphate in 2014. Beyond this unprecedented territorial presence, the group carried out attacks in a dozen other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, and Turkey, and its regional affiliates have roiled already volatile situations in Afghanistan and Libya. Al-Qaeda and ISIS, however, are but two of the dozens of groups named as terrorist organizations by the US government, and for many of these the terrorist designation is more controversial.31 Indeed, among the categories of nonstate violence, terrorism carries by far the strongest moral opprobrium and unsurprisingly is also the most vociferously contested. As I explain in chapter 4, for nearly a century the conventional basis for distinguishing between terrorism and other modes of political violence was whether the violence directly targeted noncombatants. That criterion itself, however, would become hotly contested and is now one among many contending factors, many of them overtly political, that determines who is labeled a terrorist. One implication of this is that the distinctions between terrorist organizations and other nonstate groups can be fluid and even arbitrary—a fact that is both an analytical problem and an illustration of the point that various types of non-state violence should be examined together as different facets of an important dynamic in global politics.

The increasingly important role played by PMSCs has generated considerable scholarly and popular interest.32 Private contractors have become a regular presence in war zones, and states are turning to them for a growing range of services, from rear-echelon support to direct involvement in combat. Since the end of the Cold War, they have monitored ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Fall and Rise of Nonstate Violence
• 2. Coherence and Contestation: Explaining International Normative Change
• 3. Partisans, Liberators, and Militias: Normative Change and the Legitimization of Nonstate Violence
• 4. One Man’s Freedom Fighter?: Normative Change and the Geopolitical Construction of Terrorism
• 5. From Soldiers of Fortune to Fortune 500: Normative Contestation and the Return of Entrepreneurial Violence
• 6. What’s at Stake?: The Implications of Nonstate Actor Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index