The Lebanese Civil War 1975–90

This article argues that the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) was in essence a terror of state directed by mercantile economic and political elites (the comprador class) controlling the Lebanese state and society against the middle and poorer classes (the working class). The aim of this terror or organized violence was to subdue the subordinate classes, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s rebelled against the confessional system that operated for the benefit of the comprador class. The rebellion was expressed by members of the working-class joining cross-confessional nationalist and leftist parties. Hence, violence was aimed at reestablishing the confessional order as a means to restore a hegemonic system that served the interests of the comprador class at a time when this class was rehabilitating its economic role by resurrecting the financial system, which had received a severe blow in the late 1960s. It effected this rehabilitation through the Taif Agreement signed between Lebanese parliamentarians in 1989, under the auspices of Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to favor the new mercantile elite led by Rafiq Hariri.

The Shiners’ War: Social Violence in the Ottawa Valley in the 1830s

By late May of 1835, unrest in Bytown had reached unprecedented proportions. All winter, the people of the town, the entrepôt of the Ottawa timber trade, had been bracing themselves, awaiting the annual visitation, the annual affliction, of the raftsmen who came each spring from high up the Valley to roister and riot in the streets of Bytown. Like the freshets in the streams, the raftsmen and social disorder arrived each April and May. But never before had their coming brought such organized violence as it did in 1835. For the Irish timberers, now had a leader, and a purpose. Peter Aylen, run-away sailor, timber king, ambitious schemer, had set himself at the head of the Irish masses, had moulded them into a powerful weapon. He had given them a purpose: to drive the French Canadians off the river and thus guarantee jobs and high wages in the timber camps to the Irish.

Organized violence 1989–2020, with a special emphasis on Syria

This article reports on trends in organized violence, building on new data by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The falling trend in fatalities stemming from organized violence in the world, observed for five consecutive years, broke upwards in 2020 and deaths in organized violence seem to have settled on a high plateau. UCDP registered more than 80,100 deaths in organized violence in 2020, compared to 76,300 in 2019. The decrease in violence in Afghanistan and Syria was countered by escalating conflicts in, for example, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), Azerbaijan and Tigray, Ethiopia. Moreover, the call for a global ceasefire following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic failed to produce any results. In fact, the number of active state-based and non-state conflicts, as well as the number of actors carrying out one-sided violence against civilians, increased when compared to 2019. UCDP noted a record-high number of 56 state-based conflicts in 2020, including eight wars. Most of the conflicts occurred in Africa, as the region registered 30 state-based conflicts, including nine new or restarted ones.

Elective Despotism

This chapter highlights India’s elective despotism. It begins by explaining ‘resort politics’. This is the Indian ritual of herding away lawmakers like rustled sheep to secure places, usually hotels and holiday resorts, to ‘protect’ them from rival parties. This usually occurs when no one party or alliance of multiple parties has a clear majority in the legislature. At such moments, lawmakers are bought for billions of rupees and promises of high office by the highest bidder. If electoral democracy is disfigured by criminality, organized violence, and chremacracy, ‘resort politics’ marks the final stage of its decadence. As parties and legislatures kowtow to political bosses and executive supremacy, the drift towards what Thomas Jefferson first called ‘elective despotism’—elected governments that concentrate power in a few cunning and bossy hands—is unmistakable. The legislatures in effect rubber-stamp executive decisions. Governments cease to be answerable to Parliament.

Introducing the Deadly Electoral Conflict Dataset (DECO)

This article introduces the Deadly Electoral Conflict dataset (DECO): a global, georeferenced event dataset on electoral violence with lethal outcomes from 1989 to 2017. DECO allows for empirical evaluation of theories relating to the timing, location, and dynamics of deadly electoral violence. By clearly distinguishing electoral violence from related (and sometimes concurrent) instances of organized violence, DECO is particularly suitable for investigating how election-related violence is connected to other forms of violent political contention. In the article, we present the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the data collection and discuss empirical patterns that emerge in DECO. We also demonstrate one potential use of DECO by examining the association between United Nations peacekeeping forces and the prevalence of deadly electoral violence in conflict-affected countries.

Colonial Lives of the Carceral Archipelago: Rethinking the Neoliberal Security State

Mass incarceration, police brutality, and border controls are part and parcel of the everyday experiences of marginalized and racialized communities across the world. Recent scholarship in international relations, sociology, and geography has examined the prevalence of these coercive practices through the prism of “disciplinary,” “penal,” or “authoritarian” neoliberalism. In this collective discussion, we argue that although this literature has brought to the fore neoliberalism's reliance on state violence, it has yet to interrogate how these carceral measures are linked to previous forms of global racial ordering. To rectify this moment of “colonial unknowing,” the collective discussion draws on decolonial approaches, Indigenous studies, and theories of racial capitalism. It demonstrates that “new” and “neoliberal” forms of domestic control must be situated within the global longue durée of racialized and colonial accumulation by dispossession. By mapping contemporary modes of policing, incarceration, migration control, and surveillance onto earlier forms of racial–colonial subjugation, we argue that countering the violence of neoliberalism requires more than nostalgic appeals for a return to Keynesianism. What is needed is abolition—not just of the carceral archipelago, but of the very system of racial capitalism that produces and depends on these global vectors of organized violence and abandonment.

How Much Does the Compellence Theory Explain?

This chapter focuses on the case of Turkey against the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers' Party; PKK) in 1984–1999, which involves a democracy conducting a counterinsurgency campaign on its own territory against its own populace. Elite accommodation in Turkey took the form of government support for the great Kurdish landowners of the southeast, providing impunity for illegal smuggling and other accommodations in exchange for the provision of organized violence, controlling civilians to cut the flow of resources to the insurgency. The militia and military campaigns cleared vast areas of the region of their inhabitants. Indeed, the campaign defeated the PKK threat militarily. It captured and imprisoned its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, with U.S. assistance, and the insurgency withered. It was the structural change of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that created the opportunity for remnants of the PKK to regroup and reopen their campaign from northern Iraq, as well as within Turkey. Ultimately, Turkey shows the external validity of the compellence theory because it is considered a particularly brutal campaign and thus should bear little similarity to successful campaigns conducted by democratic great powers and lauded as models if the governance approach explains counterinsurgency success.

Punishment of the collaborationists in Vichy and other French regions (1944 – 1945)

The goal of this article lies in examination of the process of preventing collaborationism in the former capital of the French state, as well as in determination of whether the process of suppressing cooperation with the German occupier has any peculiarities associated with the special position of Vichy in relation to other departments. The author examines such aspects of the topic as spontaneous and organized violence in Vichy and other French regions during the postwar period (1944 – 1945). Special attention is given to reprisal against the collaborationists in Vichy and the formation of representation on the unity of France during the occupation imbued by the Gaullist state. The main conclusions of this research consists in the two interpretations of the purges that took place in the postwar years in France. The situation in the agglomeration has several similarities with the situation in multiple departments: shaving of women; government branches responsible for repressions; urgent purges. However, the fact that namely Vichy was the seat of the French government has its own peculiarities:  weak first phase of the extrajudicial purge due to the presence of law enforcement forces during the occupation and opposition, and on the other hand, the cruelty of spontaneous violence in June of 1945,  numerous arrests in the first two weeks after the liberation, excessive city residents representation in the Court and  Civil Chamber, as well as severity of the sentences.