Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation

by Edited by Diane E. Davis , Anthony W. Pereira

• ISBN13: 9780521812771
• ISBN10: 0521812771
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Existing models of state formation are derived primarily from early Western European experience, and are misleading when applied to nation-states struggling to consolidate their dominion in the present period. In this volume, scholars suggest that the Western European model of armies waging war on behalf of sovereign states does not hold universally. The importance of 'irregular' armed forces - militias, guerrillas, paramilitaries, mercenaries, bandits, vigilantes, police, and so on - has been seriously neglected in the literature on this subject. The case studies in this book suggest, among other things, that the creation of the nation-state as a secure political entity rests as much on 'irregular' as regular armed forces. For most of the 'developing' world, the state's legitimacy has been difficult to achieve, constantly eroding or challenged by irregular armed forces within a country's borders. No account of modern state formation can be considered complete without attending to irregular forces.

Table of Contents

Contributors	vii
Introduction
Contemporary Challenges and Historical Reflections on the Study of Militaries, States, and Politics	3	(34)
Diane E. Davis
PART I. THE BASIC FRAMEWORK AND BEYOND: MOBILIZATION, DEMOBILIZATION, AND NATIONAL STATE FORMATION
Armed Force, Regimes, and Contention in Europe since 1650	37	(45)
Charles Tilly
Limited War and Limited States	82	(14)
Miguel Angel Centeno
Where Do All the Soldiers Go? Veterans and the Politics of Demobilization	96	(22)
Alec Campbell
Military Mobilization and the Transformation of Property Relationships: Wars That Defined the Japanese Style of Capitalism	118	(31)
Eiko Ikegami
PART II. DECONSTRUCTING ARMED FORCES: FROM MILITARIES TO MILITIAS, PARAMILITARIES, POLICE, AND VETERANS
Send a Thief to Catch a Thief: State-Building and the Employment of Irregular Military Formations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Greece	149	(29)
Achilles Batalas
Reform and Reaction: Paramilitary Groups in Contemporary Colombia	178	(31)
Mauricio Romero
Policing the People, Building the State: The Police-Military Nexus in Argentina, 1880--1945	209	(23)
Laura Kalmanowiecki
War-Making and U.S. State Formation: Mobilization, Demobilization, and the Inherent Ambiguities of Federalism	232	(21)
Susan M. Browne
Politics Is Thicker Than Blood: Union and Confederate Veterans in the U.S. House of Representatives in the Late Nineteenth Century	253	(28)
Richard Franklin Bensel
PART III. NOT JUST THE NATION-STATE: EXAMINING THE LOCAL, REGIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL NEXUS OF ARMED FORCE AND STATE FORMATION
The Police Municipale and the Formation of the French State	281	(22)
Lizabeth Zack
Domestic Militarization in a Transnational Perspective: Patriotic and Militaristic Youth Mobilization in France and Indochina, 1940--1945	303	(19)
Anne Raffin
The Changing Nature of Warfare and the Absence of State-Building in West Africa	322	(24)
William Reno
The Ghost of Vietnam: America Confronts the New World Disorder	346	(41)
Ian Roxborough
CONCLUSION
Armed Forces, Coercive Monopolies, and Changing Patterns of State Formation and Violence	387	(22)
Anthony W. Pereira
Index	409