Slipping Away

Desertion ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Théodore McLauchlin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
War Zone ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Military Units

This chapter explains how armed groups in civil wars are able, or not, to prevent desertion as combatants often leave in some wars to go home, switch sides, or flee the war zone altogether. It analyses how some armed groups keep their soldiers fighting over long periods of time and explains why other groups fall apart from desertion and defection. It also explores the world of combatants in military units, with their comrades and commanders. The chapter discusses bonds of trust among combatants that keep them fighting, mistrust that pushes them to leave, and beliefs about political commitments and the motivation to fight. It clarifies how trust and mistrust depend on what soldiers perceive about others' motivations, both political and military.

Conclusion

Desertion ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Théodore McLauchlin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Military Units

This chapter explains desertion in civil wars in terms of the complicated and counterintuitive dynamics of trust and mistrust at the heart of military units in times that tear countries apart. It bridges a long-running theoretical debate about how to understand people's motivations in civil wars. It also elaborates the grand causes of civil wars that matter through the interaction of combatants, which accepts that civil wars are both political and personal. The chapter pays attention to relations among combatants as key mechanisms driving armies forward and suggests a new theoretical extension that goes beyond interactions among armed groups. It focuses on signals, trust, and desertion that proposes arguments about when armed groups are likely to adopt the practices that are important for fostering trust and limiting desertion.

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Community Groups ◽  
Civil Action ◽  
The World

Many view civil wars as violent contests between armed combatants. But history shows that community groups, businesses, NGOs, local governments, and even armed groups can respond to war by engaging in civil action. Characterized by a reluctance to resort to violence and a willingness to show enough respect to engage with others, civil action can slow, delay, or prevent violent escalations. This volume explores how people in conflict environments engage in civil action, and the ways such action has affected violence dynamics in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia. These cases highlight the critical and often neglected role that civil action plays in conflicts around the world.

Desertion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Théodore McLauchlin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The World ◽  
Military Units

This book examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. The book explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, the book focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. The book pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, it draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other — or not. In doing so, it demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. It argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. The book brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place?

The Book of Tribulations: The Syrian Muslim Apocalyptic Tradition'

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cook ◽  
Nu'aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
To Come

“The Book of Tribulations by Nu`aym b. Hammad al-Marwazi (d. 844) is the earliest Muslim apocalyptic work to come down to us. Its contents focus upon the cataclysmic events to happen before the end of the world, the wars against the Byzantines, and the Turks, and the Muslim civil wars. There is extensive material about the Mahdi (messianic figure), the Muslim Antichrist and the return of Jesus, as well as descriptions of Gog and Magog. Much of the material in Nu`aym today is utilized by Salafi-jihadi groups fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Incentivizing Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslav Tir ◽  
Johannes Karreth
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Tools ◽  
The Impact

Civil wars are one of the most pressing problems facing the world. Common approaches such as mediation, intervention, and peacekeeping have produced some results in managing ongoing civil wars, but they fall short in preventing civil wars in the first place. This book argues for considering civil wars from a developmental perspective to identify steps to assure that nascent, low-level armed conflicts do not escalate to full-scale civil wars. We show that highly structured intergovernmental organizations (IGOs, e.g. the World Bank or IMF) are particularly well positioned to engage in civil war prevention. Such organizations have both an enduring self-interest in member-state peace and stability and potent (economic) tools to incentivize peaceful conflict resolution. The book advances the hypothesis that countries that belong to a larger number of highly structured IGOs face a significantly lower risk that emerging low-level armed conflicts on their territories will escalate to full-scale civil wars. Systematic analyses of over 260 low-level armed conflicts that have occurred around the globe since World War II provide consistent and robust support for this hypothesis. The impact of a greater number of memberships in highly structured IGOs is substantial, cutting the risk of escalation by over one-half. Case evidence from Indonesia’s East Timor conflict, Ivory Coast’s post-2010 election crisis, and from the early stages of the conflict in Syria in 2011 provide additional evidence that memberships in highly structured IGOs are indeed key to understanding why some low-level armed conflicts escalate to civil wars and others do not.

On the beginning of the world: dominance feminism, afropessimism and the meanings of gender

2021 ◽  
pp. 146470012110340
Author(s):  
Jennifer C. Nash
Keyword(s):  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Commitments

Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajectory rarely invokes dominance feminism, and often positions itself as a critique of feminism’s imagined conception of gender as white, one that is thought to be most emphatically announced in the work of scholars like MacKinnon who invest in a gender binary, and in women’s oppressed location in this binary. In this article, I insist on reading dominance feminism and afropessimism together. In so doing, I aspire to challenge afropessimism’s prevailing conception of gender, revealing that while it is often critical of feminist conceptions of gender – particularly conceptualisations of gender that are thought to insist on the shared experiences and positions of women – it actually relies on similar argumentative moves, and even rhetorical seductions, as dominance feminism.

The International Criminal Court's Provisional Authority to Coerce

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Franceschet
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
World Order ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Right

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide that it failed earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states.

The United Nations and the homecoming of displaced populations

1994 ◽  
Vol 34 (301) ◽  
pp. 340-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Allen
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Displaced Populations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
International Border

According to UNHCR figures, in 1970 there were 2.5 million refugees in the world. In 1980, the figure was 11 million. By the early 1990s, the alarming spread of civil wars was prompting an average of 10,000 people a day to flee across an international border. In 1993, the estimated number of refugees had risen to 18.2 million. In addition there were at least 24 million people who been forcibly displaced within their own countries (UNHCR, 1993:1). In 1994, the situation has deteriorated further, particularly in Africa. In the past few weeks, well over a million refugees have fled the fighting in Rwanda.

scholarly journals The Organization of Political Violence by Insurgencies

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roos Haer
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Probit Model ◽  
Ordered Probit ◽  
Process Theory ◽  
Ordered Probit Model ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Armed Group ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractA range of theories have attempted to explain the variation in civilian abuse of warring parties. Most of these theories have been focused on the strategic environment in which these acts take place. Less attention is devoted to the perpetrators of these human right abuses themselves: the armed groups. This study tries to fill this niche by using the organizational process theory in which it is assumed that armed groups, like every organization, struggles for survival. The leader tries to ensure the maintenance of her armed group by increasing her control over her troops. The relationship between the level of control and the perpetrated civilian abuse is examined with a new dataset on the internal structure of more than 70 different armed groups around the world. With the help of a Bayesian Ordered Probit model, this new dataset on civilian abuse is analyzed. The results show that especially particular incentives play an important role.

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