In much of the world, violence remains ubiquitous in processes of political contestation and state formation.[10] Such violence takes many different forms and features different levels of intensity. Latin America, for example, has high levels of criminal and law-and-order violence, mostly committed by criminal networks and governmental coercive organisations with a mix of commercial and political objectives. In the Middle East and North Africa, there is a wider range of coercive organisations that use violence to pursue mostly political and religious ends.[11]

In this report, we focus on the organisation of coercive capabilities to engage in collective violence to achieve political ends. We view violence as a tool in political contestation, one which is purposefully structured through the creation of different types of coercive organisation, including what are commonly referred to as ‘armed groups’.[12] Our analysis reveals that coercive organisations are relatively easy to create once political orders with both formal and informal components of rule face serious disruption. Such organisations subsequently serve as levers to reconfigure the pre-existing political order – both from within and outside the government – and must be accommodated in any ‘new’ political order that may emerge. Doing so, however, risks re-creating the conditions that led to their emergence.

The conundrum: state formation and 21st century conflict

The nature of political order in many countries remains fundamentally contested because of persistent sociopolitical marginalisation, economic inequalities, legacies of violence, or all three.[13] Such cleavages tend to coincide with latent identity groups that can be mobilised politically once sufficient grievances have accumulated, interpretative frames developed and, possibly, external support solicited.[14] In such contexts, certain types and manifestations of coercive organisation can function as part of larger sociopolitical platforms that have greater legitimacy among particular constituencies and/or capability than the government, with the latter often being the source of the problem.[15] Consider Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the PKK in Turkey and Saraya al-Salam in Iraq. From this perspective, coercive organisations can be legitimate vehicles for sociopolitical emancipation, representation and even modernisation.[16] Compounding this persistent problem of political contestation is the fact that many post-colonial countries have a highly heterogeneous make-up due to the imposed and artificial nature of their borders. This facilitates the emergence of both competing identities and alternative power centres if no adequate mechanism is found to accommodate the wide and varied range of interests represented within those borders.[17]

Moreover, in a number of countries, although the government has nominal authority, it is not the decisive force behind processes of state formation.[18] Tilly’s original assertion that ‘war made the state and the state made war’ does not necessarily hold true beyond the confines of early-modern European history. For example, possibilities for resource generation and extraction (such as taxation) are no longer limited to, or even focused on, domestic populations because globalisation and technological change have enabled alternatives like easier access to foreign sponsors and markets, the use of international money transfers (formal and informal) and engagement with organised crime networks. Today, the ideas, legitimacy, funds, arms and recruits that provide the means to contest and shape a political order can be acquired through global marketplaces to an unprecedented degree.[19] At the same time, the evolution of international law and crisis management has made the harsher outcomes of violent conflict less acceptable (e.g. conquest, elimination or dissolution). This means that power centres alternative to the government cannot necessarily be fought into submission and then bloodily subjugated without an international outcry or intervention out of concern for, for example, minority groups or humanitarian imperatives, interrupting the process before it is completed.[20] This suggests that fragmentation of coercive capabilities, power and authority is both more easily initiated and more easily sustained.

The upshot of the preceding analysis is that coercive organisations are not simply aberrations but part of a peer group of actors, which often includes the government of the day. These peers compete for control over (part of) the state‘s authority under a set of 21^st century conditions that make conflict easier to start but more difficult to end. Empirically speaking, under such conditions coercive organisations can represent a significant source of material and ideological strength. If continuous violence is to be avoided, they need to be accommodated in state formation processes, at least for some time and in limited form. More philosophically, given the unfinished business of state formation in many countries, one could defensibly suggest that the privileges that today’s state-centric ordering of the world confers on many governments is a major cause of conflict. These government privileges do not reflect the empirical reality of much messier contestations of legitimacy, power and social allegiance in many countries and conflicts – in which coercive organisations play a major role.

Arguably, this is nowhere clearer than in the Levant since the Arab uprisings. The stormy events of 2011 turned the placid and ossified political orders of the Middle East into a cauldron of political contestation and disruption.[21] In Syria, Yemen and Iraq, the political contestation that followed this disruption has led to large-scale violence. But the hitherto seemingly stable political orders of Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and various Gulf countries have also become more vulnerable – as recent protests, purges and crises have demonstrated. In response, their ruling elites are beefing up the status quo.[22] Consider, for example, the new assertive foreign policy of the Saudis and Emiratis, which emphasises the nationalism and honour of their country at home (exemplified by the recent Saudi ‘twitter spat’ with Canada over imprisonment of a human rights activist), maintains their ruling families in power, and seeks to halt Iran’s regional ascent.

It is in such situations of authoritarian entrenchment, revolutionary uprising and political fragmentation resulting in violence that coercive organisations thrive as protection mechanisms, extensions of authoritarian influence and vehicles for acquiring political power.[23] For example, the increase in regional geopolitical and identity competition has increased the incentives for the Levant’s stronger authoritarian states to support hybrid, anti-regime and sometimes even anti-state coercive organisations in other states as proxies for their foreign policies. Effectively, this overlays the domestic interests of such coercive organisations with foreign ones, complicating conflict resolution and creating even greater ambiguities in terms of loyalty and hybridity. The mix of state weakness, revolutionary polarisation and growing sectarianism has also facilitated linkages between political groups, religious schools of thought and coercive organisations to create platforms that provide and protect – in place of the state.[24] Such platforms – like the Sadrists in Iraq – compete as well as work with the state, sometimes becoming part of it in the process by either capturing elements of it or by discharging some of its functions.

This is not to say that coercive organisations are necessarily progressive. Indeed, as regards the Syrian Arab Army, IS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the opposite is the case. But it does suggest that the intellectual and practical unwillingness to rethink how this gap between the normative conception and empirical reality of political contestation can be bridged is problematic from a peacebuilding perspective.

On the need to re-conceptualise armed groups as coercive organisations

In the literature on armed conflict, rebellion, proxy warfare and civil war, ‘armed group’, ‘militia’ and ‘armed faction’ are common labels attached to non-governmental entities capable of wielding some degree of coercive capability.[25] The term ‘armed group’, especially, is common in both academic parlance and policy discourse.[26] All these labels can be viewed as a legacy of the conceptualisation of civil war as violent conflict between the ruling government and one or more rebel groups seeking to overthrow it. But they all fail to reflect two important advancements in the recent literature on intrastate conflict and political (dis)order.[27]

First, debate on the nature and governance of the state has come to consider hybrid political orders,[28] limited access orders[29] and areas of limited statehood[30] as prevalent – almost standard – forms of political organisation in much of those parts of the world that are characterised by conflict and fragility. While such orders are in part a consequence of a government not having a secure monopoly on violence, their causes go much further. They include different practices and expectations of governance and various democratisation trajectories, as well as the utility and durability of patronage and clientelist systems as mechanisms of politico-economic organisation. The result is that the government shares authority, legitimacy and capacity with other entities. In turn, this undermines both the de jure and the de facto claim that the government, seen as a unitary entity, represents the state.[31] This makes the ‘state’ vs. ‘non-state’ dichotomy that the term ‘armed group’ implies inappropriate. It is normatively and practically prejudiced because the government often does not represent the state in contemporary intrastate conflicts.

In addition, research on fragmentation in civil wars has demonstrated that contemporary conflicts no longer tend to be fought by two easily distinguishable and clearly opposing warring parties, but instead feature a multitude of different organisations that fight one another as much as they fight their common enemy.[32] Such conflicts involve actors that do not neatly fit either the state or the non-state category. For instance, ‘non-state armed groups’ can be used – even created – by a government to fight for the state and become part of it (e.g. the Al-Hashd al-Sha’abi in Iraq); they can be developed by a subnational government but fight in part against the national government (e.g. the Peshmerga in Iraq between 2015 and 2017 insofar as the disputed territories are concerned); or they can be formed outside of the government and fight against either the government (e.g. the Syrian opposition) or the state (e.g. IS). And what to make of an armed group like Hezbollah, which co-governs Lebanon as a political party and runs the south of the country, and which comes to the rescue of President Assad’s regime while working with Syrian militias that used to run smuggling networks (the Shabiha)?[33]

It is for these reasons that we use the term coercive organisation instead of armed group in the remainder of our analysis. Through this reconceptualisation we put all actors with the organisational capability to exert large-scale violence against ‘outsiders’ and to control violence within their respective strongholds and communities on an even normative keel. It considers various government-related coercive organisations and other armed groups as tools of political contestation on a single continuum. Using the term coercive organisation also implies that we focus our analysis on those entities that maintain an organisational structure over a sustained period of time, while excluding ad hoc coalitions, groups that only exist temporarily and warlords.

The corollary of this reconceptualisation is that considering non-state varieties of coercive organisation as atypical governance actors, treating them as inconvenient spoilers or excluding them as terrorist groups reflects the normative preferences and preferred outcomes of struggles for power more than their actual political significance, legitimacy or social support. Examples include Turkey’s framing of the PKK, and Israeli labelling of Hamas and Hezbollah, as terrorist groups only. This is not just simply reductionist,[34] but also denies the importance of political rights and inclusion. In addition, it arguably promotes the continuation of violent conflict. Putting such blinders aside enables more neutral exploration of coercive organisations in terms of form and function.

A typology of coercive organisations

While some coercive organisations have clear and distinctive purposes that depend on the position, interests and power of their creators or sponsors, many pursue multiple objectives and maintain different allegiances at the same time, some of which may seem contradictory. This makes them hard to categorise. For example, Iraq’s Peshmerga are at the same time militias that protect the personal and family interests of the ruling elites of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), armed factions of the main political parties of the KRI, forces of resistance against the Iraqi government, and official security forces sanctioned by that same government.[35]

This observation notwithstanding, a simple typology of coercive organisations can provide us with the basic categories that can then be used to problematise and reflect on the use of any single one of them. Much of the variation in the form and function of coercive organisations can be captured by categorising them as peers based on their attitude towards the state and its government. This places coercive organisations along a continuum that ranges from full cooperation to full competition with the state and/or government. The first three types outlined below – governmental, quasi-governmental and hybrid coercive organisations – operate in whole or in part within the framework of government and state. While governmental coercive organisations are officially part of the state and typically serve the purpose of protecting and supporting the existing regime, quasi-governmental and (in part) hybrid coercive organisations also operate in support of the government (as well as its associated elites and coercive organisations), but they are not part of the state’s institutional framework. They are contenders for political power within, essentially, the existing political order. Next, hybrid coercive organisations (in other part) and anti-regime coercive organisations accept the framework of the state but challenge the existing government. They seek to take over, replace or reconfigure the existing political order, but not the state. Finally, anti-state coercive organisations dispute government as well as state. They are existential threats to both, and this is one reason why they are resisted with determination. Table 1 below reflects this continuum.

Within this typology, hybrid coercive organisations deserve particular attention. They are situated in the middle of the continuum. What makes them of interest is that they simultaneously compete and cooperate with governmental agents in pursuit of the sociopolitical objectives of groups or constituencies that are part of the same state. Hybrid coercive organisations do not reject the state’s authority as illegitimate in principle. Instead, they often operate within the generally accepted framework for political contestation and oftentimes (selectively) work closely with governmental or quasi-governmental coercive organisations. This sets them apart from anti-regime or anti-state coercive organisations, both of which operate fully in opposition to the government and its coercive apparatus. At the same time, hybrid coercive organisations also engage in competition for political power over (part of) the government and its institutions, including by means of coercive capabilities where this is useful.

Hybrid coercive organisations thus have an ambiguous relationship with the government that is neither fully autonomous nor fully dependent. This relationship is also dynamic in the sense that the degree of autonomy or dependency, as well as the ratio of competition versus cooperation, varies over time. We postulate that the relational ambiguity that results from such behavioural and institutional hybridity represents a rational, comprehensive and bet-hedging strategy in the struggle for power. It creates more flexibility and a greater scope of action to reconfigure a given political order in line with the interest of a hybrid coercive organisation. Prominent examples of strategically leveraging hybridity include the ascent of Hezbollah in the Lebanese political system, the Badr Corps in Iraq and the YPG in Syria.[37]