Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We argue, based on Colombia and Myanmar, that a relational approach (state-actors) can help us understand the diversity and role of intra-systemic actors in conflict, their often shifting allegiances, their contradictions with various structures of the state and their relationships to elites.

Paper long abstract

Pro-state paramilitaries, pro-state militias or intra-systemic armed group occupy an ambiguous position in conflict studies. This is partly because the terms themselves to refer to various violent brokers in internal armed conflict are used in contradictory and inconsistent ways in different countries. But this seems to also be the case because of the dominant lenses used to understand the place of these actors in contemporary conflict. There is a tendency, in one scholarly tradition, to understand them as simple (rather unproblematic) extension of the counter-insurgent state, lacking their own agenda. This literature understands the state as a monolithic entity, glossing over the actual contradictions and conflicts between state apparatuses and these actors. Another scholarly tradition, tends to regard these intra-systemic actors as autonomous entities that can be investigated without a reference to the state and its apparatuses. In this tradition, the focus is the groups as such and the state remains under-theorised. In this paper we will argue that we need a relational approach to understand these actors and their relative autonomy vis-a-vis state apparatuses. By investigating the cases of Colombia and Myanmar, we argue that this relational approach can help us understand their diversity and to provide a much clearer picture of the role of these actors in conflict, their often shifting allegiances, their different contradictions with various structures of the state and their relationships to elites.