About the author(s):
Professor Anastasia Shesterinina is Chair in Comparative Politics and Founding Director of the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York. She leads the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship funded Civil War Paths project “Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach.” She is also the Senior Qualitative Methods Expert of the FCDO funded Beyond Compliance Consortium. Her book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) received the 2022 Charles Taylor Book Award of the American Political Science Association and Davis Center Book Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her research on the dynamics of civil war has been published in American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies and other journals.
Editors’ note: This post forms part of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, featured across Articles of War and Armed Groups and International Law. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address harm and need.
It is now widely recognized that non-international armed conflicts are not dyadic contests between state and non-state armed actors over government or territory but complex social processes that involve multiple actors. Commonly referred to as intra-state or civil wars in non-legal research, these conflicts unfold through evolving interactions between state, non-state, civilian, and external actors, which shape conflict dynamics from pre- to post-war periods. It is also now recognized that these actors are not unitary but involve different structures, which is particularly challenging when it comes to the view of non-state armed groups (NSAGs) as ‘uniform collective entities’ in international law. Further complicating the reality on the ground are ambiguities in the boundaries between the categories of actors. This contribution focuses on such ambiguities and their implications for efforts to generate and apply clear typologies of actors in research on the lived experiences of conflict, relations between distinct actors, and such outcomes of interest as compliance with international law, which lie at the heart of the Beyond Compliance Consortium’s programme of work.
It takes more than two: the range of actors in non-international armed conflicts
Advances in the civil war literature are crucial for our understanding of the multiplicity of actors in non-international armed conflicts. Scholars of civil war in political and other social sciences have long departed from the assumption of unified state and non-state sides in their analyses. Instead, studies have looked at multiple armed actors active in contemporary civil wars, fragmentation within these actors, and the effects of their interactions, from alliance formation to in-fighting, on various conflict outcomes such as war duration and severity.
The focus of these studies has been predominantly on NSAGs, specifically rebel or insurgent groups that seek to take over the state or part of its territory. The ‘organizational turn’ in this literature has drawn our attention to different structures within these groups understood ‘qua organizations.’ Distinguishing military from non-military structures has enabled insights, for example, on how insurgent ‘civil administrations’ engage in social service provision in the areas these groups control and govern, how their support and logistical apparatuses generate organizational resilience and sustain armed conflicts, and how their political wings, including political education institutions, promote violence restraint. The recognition that NSAGs are highly diverse and complex organizations, whose structures vary and change over time, has also raised questions about the inclusion of their civilian and political wings in the concept of ‘Party’ to a non-international armed conflict under international humanitarian law (IHL).
But state and non-state armed actors with their different structures are not the only actors that affect the evolution of armed conflicts. A broader range of actors should be taken into account to understand lived realities of conflict. These include armed actors such as pro-government militias, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and other ‘extralegal groups’ that do not seek to take over the state or part of its territory but to accumulate profit, and private military and security companies. These actors complicate conflict environments by engaging in a range of violent and non-violent interactions with state and non-state armed actors at the heart of the conflict, establishing their own parallel institutions in local communities, and thwarting humanitarian access to civilian populations, among other effects. These and other armed actors involved in the conflict may originate in the states where conflicts take place but often draw on external support, including from third states and diasporas. In addition, armed contingents of regional and international organizations contribute to conflict dynamics, as sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by United Nations (UN) peacekeepers against local civilians illustrates.
Conflict-affected individuals and groups, local and international humanitarian, human rights, and other organizations, traditional and religious leaders, and commercial actors and donors all shape conflict environments where multiple armed actors operate, driven by their own ‘distinct logic.’ For example, civilians rely on ‘local knowledge and networks’ to devise contextually informed self-protection strategies and exercise their ‘protective agency’ in a variety of ways, from refusing to cooperate to collectively resisting armed actors. In contrast, classical humanitarian operations are based not on ‘local people and institutions’ but rather the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence underlying humanitarian actors’ identities and practices. In turn, religious leaders’ ‘claim of special legitimacy’ is rooted in religion and tradition and underpins their ability to influence armed actors. In these and other ways, a broad range of actors interact to shape dynamics of non-international armed conflicts.
Ambiguous boundaries between the categories of actors
The range of actors outlined above have been broadly categorized into state (e.g. state armed forces), non-state (e.g. NSAGs), civilian (e.g. conflict-affected individuals), and external (e.g. international organizations) in order to systematize knowledge of specific contexts and draw aggregate conclusions. Yet, ambiguous boundaries between these categories on the ground point to the need for caution in efforts to develop neat typologies of actors in armed conflict. Having been discussed to a lesser or greater extent in different legal and non-legal fora, these ambiguities invite a contextually nuanced rather than typological approach to the multiplicity of actors involved in non-international armed conflicts. Three ambiguities, between state and non-state, combatant and civilian, and internal and external actors, illustrate this argument.
While it is possible to draw distinctions between certain state and non-state actors operating in conflict environments, such as state armed forces and rebel or insurgent groups, blurred lines that sometimes exist between the state and non-state categories of actors raise critical questions about chains of command, responsibility, and delegation of violence by state to non-state actors. The links between the state and paramilitaries are particularly relevant in this regard. Paramilitaries have been commonly viewed as non-state armed actors that differ from rebel or insurgent groups. For example, recognizing their pro-government nature and links to the state, Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín compares the paramilitaries to the guerrillas in the Colombian armed conflict as non-state armed groups and finds that these groups differed in their social composition, organizational structure, and behavior toward the population. However, paramilitaries’ varied links to the state challenge their characterization as purely non-state armed groups. In some contexts, they are ‘regular forces, or police units,’ whereas in others, the link is less recognizable and they ‘operate alongside regular security forces or work independently of the state.’ This variation matters for our understanding of government involvement in actions of armed actors that operate on its directive or indirectly on its behalf.
Another ambiguous boundary is between combatants and civilians. This distinction is a basic principle in IHL. It establishes the protection of civilians in armed conflicts. Still, the blurring of the distinction is known to be ‘[t]he quintessential characteristic of the majority of these conflicts,’ which poses questions about the enforcement and limitations of IHL. As Ashley Jackson argues based on hundreds of interviews in Afghanistan, ‘[c]ivilians and the Taliban are enmeshed in the same cultural, social and kinship fabric,’ related by blood, marriage, and other ties; hence, treating them as ‘completely distinct categories… does not match the lived reality of civil war.’ Such links between armed actors and civilians, Katharine Fortin explains on this blog, are important for consideration of ‘armed group membership’ under IHL. How civilians engage with these actors matters for this consideration and therefore their protection from targeting. For example, ‘political, administrative or other non-combat functions’ are not considered membership criteria. In practice, however, civilians have been targeted regardless of their participation in armed group activities, particularly in areas these groups control and govern. Thus, the blurring of the legal distinction is only a part of their reality on the ground.
The boundary between the internal and external categories of actors has been interrogated as well, especially within the ‘local turn’ in the literature on peacebuilding. International donors and organizations have praised local ownership, partnership, and legitimacy as a ‘saviour’ of internationally funded and led peacebuilding that disregards local context. Yet, local actors have variously accepted, adapted to, and resisted foreign interventions, co-producing their outcomes with international counterparts in what is known as ‘hybrid peace.’ Viewing local and international actors as ‘binary opposites’ misses this joint production based on the agency and power dynamics among both categories of actors as well as concrete links between them. The inclusion in liberal peace programs of local elites or traditional leaders at the expense of women or minorities exemplifies such links and underlying power dynamics. As Milli Lake shows in the Democratic Republic of Congo, wartime elites included in international rule-of-law projects co-opt resulting institutions, with implications for reproduction of conflict after war. The delegation of war by foreign states to local NSAGs is another example of such links as well as the links between the state and non-state categories of actors discussed above.
This discussion demonstrates that while typologies of actors can be a useful starting point in the analyses of non-international armed conflicts, application of such categories as state and non-state, combatant and civilian, or internal and external actors to conflict settings reveals ground-level complexities that typologies struggle to capture. A more nuanced, contextually specific approach to actors and their relations can help better understand these complexities and lived realities of conflict associated with them.