Coercive organisations are actors with the institutional capacity to exert large-scale violence against outsiders for political purposes, and to control violence within their respective strongholds or constituencies. Adapted by the authors from: Boege, V., A. Brown, K. Clements and A. Nolan, On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: State Formation in the Context of ‘Fragility’, Berlin: Berghof, 2008.
See for example: ICG, Iraq’s paramilitary groups: The challenge of re-building a functional state, Brussels: ICG, 2018; Ezzeddine, N. and E. van Veen, Power in perspective: Four key insights into Iraq’s al-Hashd al-Sha’abi, The Hague: Clingendael, 2018.
By way of example: Lacher, W. and al-Idrissi, A., Capital of militias: Tripoli’s armed groups capture the Libyan state, Geneva: Small Arms Survey, SANA briefing paper, 2018.
See also: World Bank Group (WBG) and United Nations (UN), Pathways for peace: Inclusive approaches to preventing violent conflict, Washington DC: WB, 2018.
The Syrian Shabiha mutated into their current form of pro-regime militia(s) from pre-existing smuggling networks in response to persistent mass protests threatening the survival of the Syrian regime.
The emergence of Iraq’s Peshmerga, first as a guerrilla movement and later as a state-sanctioned force, increased the threat of Kurdish dissatisfaction with Iraq’s political order, which originates from their persistent marginalisation.
Della Porta, Tilly and Kalyvas consider violence to be an emergent phenomenon. In Della Porta’s words: ‘the choice to use violence develops in action’. Della Porta (2013), op.cit.
We combine deductive thinking based on a literature review with inductive thinking based on case studies of selected quasi-governmental and hybrid coercive organisations in the Levant. See the annex for the methodology.