ST du Groupe AFSP « Violences et conflit »

Atelier 1

Interventions occidentales et dispositifs miliciens

Western Interventions and Militia dispositifs

Responsables scientifiques :

Adam Baczko (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP) adam.baczko@gmail.com
Arthur Quesnay (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP) quesnay.arthur@gmail.com

Cet atelier prend la formation de milices comme analyseur des pratiques occidentales de la guerre. Il s’agit d’étudier la manière dont les appareils militaires occidentaux suscitent des dynamiques miliciennes et les conséquences socio-politiques et en termes de violence sur les civils (Davis & Pereira : 2003).

Depuis les années 1990, les interventions armées construisent des « dispositifs miliciens » (Chauveau, Bobo, Kouassi & Moussa : 2012), reproduisant des techniques de contrôle et de stabilisation des territoires relativement similaires, bien que les interventions prennent place dans des sociétés très différentes. Néanmoins, sur le plan épistémologique, la formation des milices est généralement étudiée sous l’angle stratégique, et donc normatif, avec une prégnance des approches néo-positivistes ou des travaux d’expertise (Jentzsch, Kalyvas & Schubiger : 2015 ; Carey, Mitchell : 2017). Rompre avec cette perspective suppose de ne pas chercher à évaluer le degré d’efficacité des milices et leur « échec » pour se concentrer sur les effets sociaux de leur formation à travers trois thématiques. Quelle est la trajectoire historique de ces pratiques ? Dans quelle mesure les circulations des compétences au sein des armées occidentales agissent-elles sur la mise en place des dispositifs ? En quoi cela transforme-t-il les sociétés ?

Dans un premier temps, nous aborderons la formation historique des pratiques miliciennes. La formation de milices mobilise un imaginaire qui essentialise des identités dans la continuité des pratiques coloniales (Olsson : 2007). L’armement de populations participe à des processus d’assignation identitaire dans des espaces de projection considérés comme périphériques par les armées occidentales. À travers les dispositifs miliciens, on s’interrogera ainsi sur la trajectoire des politiques de réification des identités ethniques, « tribales » ou religieuses et dans quelle mesure ces politiques identitaires influencent la construction des milices. De plus, la création de milices provoque ou accompagne une restructuration de segments sociaux. Cela nous conduira à interroger l’autonomisation des appareils miliciens vis-à-vis de leur groupe social d’« origine » ou de leurs parrains occidentaux, la montée de nouvelles élites miliciennes et leur politisation (Gayer & Jaffrelot : 2008 ; Arjona, Kasfir & Mampilly : 2015). En effet, ces facteurs nous semblent déterminants dans la recomposition des rapports de forces locaux dans les interventions postcoloniales avec une question ouverte sur la production d’ « économies de la violence » particulières (Baczko et Dorronsoro : 2017).

Ensuite, nous étudierons la formation de milices comme produit d’un savoir-faire circulant dans les armées occidentales à travers le parcours des officiers, l’évolution des concepts enseignés et la production d’une littérature « opérationnelle » spécifique, comme les manuels de contre-insurrection (Heuser : 2007 ; Isaac : 2008). Ces savoirs mêlent imaginaires impériaux et coloniaux, gestion des périphéries par décharge, encadrement des populations notamment dans intervention post-2003 (Gregory : 2004 ; Gentile, Taillat & Vallons : 2009). Les contributions pourront ainsi interroger la structuration des réseaux qui portent la circulation de ces savoirs.

Enfin, l’impact des milices sur les sociétés engagées dans la guerre constitue le dernier axe de ce panel. Quelle stratégie de résistance observe-t-on au sein des populations face à ces assignations identitaires ? Nous étudierons également les effets sur la transformation des identités locales et sur la réorganisation des rapports sociaux entre les groupes. Dans quelle mesure les modes de gouvernances des milices transforment-ils (Hoffmann et Vlassenroot : 2014 ; Hoffmann & Vermeijer : 2018), dressant de nouvelles frontières tout en modifiant la nature des violences exercées (Colombo : 2018) ?

This workshop builds on the formation of militias as an analyser of Western war practices. We propose to interrogate the way in which Western military apparatus trigger militia dynamics and its socio-political consequences, and in terms of violence towards civilians (Davis & Pereira: 2003).

Since the 1990s, armed interventions have built up “militia dispositifs” (Chauveau, Bobo, Kouassi & Moussa : 2012), reproducing techniques of stabilisation and control over relatively similar territories, thought the interventions take place in very different societies. Nevertheless, epistemologically speaking, the formation of militias is generally studied from a strategic, and therefore normative, angle, with an emphasis on neo-positivist and expert studies (Jentzsch, Kalyvas & Schubiger : 2015 ; Carey, Mitchell: 2017). Breaking with this perspective implies not seeking to evaluate the degree of efficiency of militias, and their “failure”, but rather, focusing on the social effects of their formation through three themes. What is the historical trajectory of these practices? To what extent do circulations of competence within Western armies have an effect on the implementation of of such dispositifs? How does this transform societies?

First of all, we will examine the historical formation of militia practices. The formation of militias involves an imaginary which essentialises identities in continuity with colonial practices. The arming of populations participates in processes of identity assignation in spaces of projection considered as peripheral by Western armies. By means of militias, we will also question the trajectory of these policies of reification of ethnic, “tribal’ or religious identities, and the extent to which this identity politics influence the construction of militias. Moreover, the creation of militias causes or goes along with a restructuring of social segments. This will lead us to examine the autonomisation of militias with regards to their “original” social group, or their Western sponsors, the rise of new militia elites and their politicisation (Gayer & Jaffrelot : 2008 ; Arjona, Kasfir, Mampilly: 2015). Indeed, these factors seem to us to be determining in the recomposition of local power dynamics in postcolonial interventions, with an open question regarding the production of specific “economies of violence” (Baczko and Dorronsoro: 2017).

We will then study the formation of militias as a product of a savoir-faire circulating in Western armies by way of the officer’s trajectories, the evolution of taught concepts, and the production of a specific “operational” literature, such as counter-insurrectionary manuals (Heuser: 2007; Isaac: 2008). This knowledge mixes imperial and colonial imaginaries, the management of peripheries by discharge, and population control, especially in interventions after 2003 (Gregory :2004 ; Gentile, Taillat & Vallons: 2009). The contributions can therefore question the structuring of networks which contribute to the circulation of this knowledge.

The panel’s final theme will be the impact of militias on societies affected by war. Which forms of resistance can be observed within populations faced with these identity assignations? We will also study the effects on the transformation of local identities and on the reorganisation of social relationships between groups. To what extent do militias’ modes of governance transform daily life (Hoffmann and Vlassenroot: 2014), establishing new boundaries whilst simultaneously modifying the nature of the violence carried out (Colombo: 2018)?  

REFERENCES

Arjona Anna, Kasfir Nelson , Mampilly Zachariah Cherian (dir), Rebel Governance in Civil War, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2015

Baczko Adam, Dorronsoro Gilles, « Pour une approche sociologique des guerres civiles », Revue française de science politique, 2017, vol. 67, n^o 2.

Carey Sabine C., Mitchell Neil J., « Progovernment Militias », Annual Review of Political Science, mai 2017, Vol. 20, p. 127-147.

Colombo, Pamela, « Les villages stratégiques : politiques contre-insurrectionnelles et regroupements de populations ». Critique Internationale, nº79, avril-juin 2018.

Chauveau Jean-Pierre, Bobo S., Kouassi N., Moussa K., « Milices rurales en Côte d’Ivoire durant le conflit (zone sud) : reconceptualiser le « dispositif milicien » », in Bazenguissa-Ganga R. (dir.), Makki S. (dir.) Sociétés en guerres : ethnographies des mobilisations violentes, Paris, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2012.

Davis Diane E., Pereira Anthony W. (eds), Irregular Armed Forces their Role in Politics and State Formation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Gayer Laurent et Jaffrelot Christophe, Milices armées d’Asie du Sud, Paris, Presses de Sciences-po, 2008.

Gentile Gian P., Taillat Stéphane, Bricet des Vallons Georges-Henri, « Les mythes de la contre-insurrection et leurs dangers : une vision critique de l’US Army », Sécurité globale, 2009, n^o 10, p. 21‑34.

Gregory Derek, The Colonial Present. Afghanistan, Irak, Palestine, Londres, Wiley, 2004.

Heuser Beatrice, « The Cultural Revolution in Counter-Insurgency », Journal of Strategic Studies, février 2007, vol. 30, n^o 1, p. 153-171.

Hoffmann Kasper, Vlassenroot Koen, « Armed groups and the exercise of public authority: the cases of the Mayi-Mayi and Raya Mutomboki in Kalehe, South Kivu », Peacebuilding, 2014, Vol. 2, n°2.

Hoffmann Kasper et Verweijen Judith, « Rebel Rule: A Governmentality Perspective », 2018, African Affairs.

Jeffrey C. Isaac et al., « Review Symposium: The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political Praxis », Perspectives on Politics, 2008, vol. 6, n^o 2.

Jentzsch Corinna, Kalyvas Stathis N. et Schubiger Livia Isabella, « Militias in Civil Wars », Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2015, Vol. 59, n°5.

Christian Olsson, « Guerre totale et/ou force minimale ? Histoire et paradoxes des « cœurs et des esprits », Cultures & Conflits, 2007, 67. 

PROGRAMME

Introduction

Arthur Quesnay, (Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP) et Adam Baczko (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP), La circulation des dispositifs miliciens dans les interventions occidentales

Pamela Colombo (Université Laval, Québec), Circulation des « actions civiques militaires » : entre techniques de contre-insurrection et politiques de développement rural durant la guerre froide en Amérique Latine »

Adam Baczko (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP), Réinvention de la tribu et gouvernance internationalisée : la formation de milices par l’armée américaine en Afghanistan »

Arthur Quesnay (Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP), La milice comme mode de gouvernance : le cas de la contre-insurrection américaine en Irak

Tanguy Quidelleur (Paris-Nanterre, Institut des Sciences sociales du Politique) , Militarisation de l’autodéfense dans un contexte de « guerre contre le terrorisme » : le cas du Burkina Faso et du Mali

Denia Chebli (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP), Être supplétif de l’armée française et négocier sa position sociale : les legs de l’histoire coloniale au Nord-Mali

Atelier 2

Paths to Civil War

Responsables scientifiques :

Gilles Dorronsoro (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP) gilles.dorronsoro@gmail.com
Anastasia Shesterinina (University of Sheffield) a.shesterinina@sheffield.ac.uk

What explains the emergence of civil wars? The literature on civil war onset has been dominated by cross-national, primarily quantitative analyses of country-case databases of civil war (Gurr 1970; Singer and Small 1994; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier and Hoeffler 2004). These studies have measured the conditions present in a society before the beginning of a civil war to draw explanations of civil war initiation from statistical tests of hypotheses linking these conditions to the risk of armed conflict within the boundaries of sovereign states. However, these studies have been marked by a range of challenges, including unreliable data, aggregation from a small sample of the existing civil wars, and measurement error. But the challenges inherent in this approach go beyond the issues of validity, interaction effects, and measurement error. This body of literature presents the same weaknesses that call into question the broader neopositivist paradigm within which this literature is situated (Baczko and Dorronsoro 2016), but with three specific criticisms.

First, the definitions of civil war used for selecting the more or less exhaustive samples of civil wars run the risk of being arbitrary or artificial (Sambanis 2004, 265). For example, the assumption that civil war starts with a specific number of deaths, usually 1,000 per year (Small and Singer 1994) or more recently 25 per year (UCDP 2013)—a fixed number that does not change depending on the size of the population—creates artificial thresholds that weaken the validity of the database and findings drawn from it. Not only do these thresholds not capture the major technologies of warfare in civil wars, with most civil wars fought as insurgencies rather than on the battlefield (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010), but they also do not account for the social, historical, and political context of war. For example, some states have been in the condition of civil war since their inception. These states include South Sudan, Somalia, and Iraq. In these instances, the question of the emergence of civil war is not very different from that of the constitution of the state (Tilly 1985). Similarly, some situations are an interlude or mere hiatus (or can be seen as such in retrospect). The period after the initial fighting of 1975-1976 in Lebanon is an example. With most civil wars recurring in countries that experienced violence in the past, the effect of prior armed confrontation on the new onset is undertheorized in threshold-based models of civil war (Walter 2010; WDR 2011).

Second, the correlations in the dominant approach to civil war onset are by definition calculated from a small sample: “civil war is relatively rare” (Sambanis 2004, 262). Hence the supposed causal mechanisms inferred in these studies are unconvincing due to the difficulty of finding comparable situations to reason ceteris paribus. Comparison of civil wars and negative cases where civil wars could have unfolded but did not is similarly missing. “Because insurgent group formation typically occurs in secrecy and in poorly monitored areas,” Lewis (2017: 1420) says in her study of armed group formation in Uganda, “the empirical record on conflicts’ start is spare and systematically omits rebels who fail before committing substantial violence.” The predictive capacity of such models is therefore low. Most countries with weak state institutions and low economic growth are not mired in civil war. Similarly, most countries with ethnic minorities, associated with higher risk of civil war, do not fall to violent conflict (Fearon et al. 2007, 187). The challenge of aggregating often unreliable data from different geographic areas and time periods without socio-historical contextualization is part of the problem.

This leads to the last point, the interaction between armed organizations and society and between the organizations and the state. Since the absence of a state monopoly on violence can be observed within widely differing social settings, how civil wars begin cannot be understood without consideration of pre-war capacity and actions that these actors exercise. While it might take a small number of dedicated individuals to launch a rebellion, civil war cannot be sustained without sufficient population support (Kalyvas 2006). Neither can it be launched nor sustained given strong state repressive capacity (Davenport et al. 2008). The role of external intervention and support is thus critical as it can shift the distribution of military capital between the internal actors (Salehyan 2007). The interaction between these processes will shape how a war unfolds.

This argument makes a number of contributions to our understanding of civil war onset. First, it challenges the association between civil war onset and a range of factors that exist in a society. Second, it shifts the focus from factors related to the risk of civil war to the interaction between state and society underlying the types of mobilization that can emerge in a society and affect whether and how civil wars unfold. This includes not only organizations in a population that are established or repurposed for rebellion and the capacity of the state to repress dissent, but also the social, political, and military capital that these actors accumulate over time drawing on internal and external support. Lastly, by focusing attention on prior mobilization, this panel highlights the importance of historical and sociological context for the study of civil war onset.

REFERENCES

Baczko Adam, Dorronsoro Gilles, « Pour une approche sociologique des guerres civiles », Revue française de science politique, 2017/2 (Vol. 67), p. 309-327.

Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 2004. “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers 56:563–595.

Fearon, James D. and David D. Laitin. 2003. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97(1):75–90. Salehyan, Idean. 2007. “Transnational Rebels: Neighboring States as Sanctuary for Rebel Groups.” World Politics 59(2):217-42.

Fearon, James D. 2007. “Iraq’s Civil War.” Foreign Affairs 86(2):2–16.

Gurr, Ted. 1970. Why men rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kalyvas, Stathis N. and Laia Balcells. 2010. “International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict.” American Political Science Review 104(3):415-29.

Salehyan, Idean. 2007. “Transnational Rebels: Neighboring States as Sanctuary for Rebel Groups.” World Politics 59(2):217-42.

Sambanis, Nicolas. 2001. “Do Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry (Part 1).” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45(3):259–82.

Sambanis, Nicolas. 2004. “What is civil war? Conceptual and empirical complexities of an operational definition.”  Journal of Conflict Resolution 48(6):814-58.

Shesterinina, Anastasia. 2016. “Collective Threat Framing and Mobilization in Civil War.” American Political Science Review 110(3): 411-27.

Singer, David J. and Melvin Small. 1994. Correlates of war project: International and civil war data, 1816-1992. Ann Arbor: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.

Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stewart, Frances. 2008. Horizontal inequalities and conflict: Understanding group violence in multiethnic societies. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tang, Shiping. 2015. “The Onset of Ethnic War: A General Theory.” Sociological Theory 33(3) : 256-79.

Tarrow, Sidney. 2007. Inside insurgencies: Politics and violence in an age of civil war. Perspectives on Politics 5(3):587-600.

Tilly, Charles. 1985. War Making and State Making as Organize Crime. In Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol eds, Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169-191.

Walter, Barbara. 2010. Conflict relapse and the sustainability of post-conflict peace.

World Development Report (WDR). 2011. World development report 2011: Conflict, security, and development. Washington, DC: World Bank.

PROGRAMME

Anastasia Shesterinina (University of Sheffield) et Gilles Dorronsoro Dorronsoro (Paris-1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, CESSP), Paths to Civil War

Lola Guyot (Institut Universitaire Européen), La violence est-elle mobilisatrice ? L’entrée en guerre au Sri Lanka

Denia Chebli (Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne), La genèse du Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) et l’entrée en guerre au Mali

Anastasia Shesterinina (University of Sheffield), Mobilizing under Uncertainty: From Fleeing to Fighting in Abkhazia

Emmanuelle Veuillet (Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne), Dynamiques nationales et configurations locales. L’entrée en guerre civile dans les Equatoria

Gilles Dorronsoro (Université Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne), Un cas de mobilisation sans mobilisateurs ? Le cas de Hérat (Afghanistan) en 1979