Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict

1. Introduction

Introduction Adria Lawrence and Erica Chenoweth Chapter 1 Recent years have seen the emergence of a growing subfield within political science that brings together scholars of international security, warfare, civil war, area studies, and comparative politics: the study of political violence . The increasing attention and resources devoted to studies of con- flict and violence reflect, at least in part, profound changes in the international system. For much of the twentieth century, scholars of international security have focused on the behavior of states in the international system, and particularly on the eruption of wars between advanced states. Yet a decline in major wars, especially among industrialized democracies, has meant that the type of violence that predominates in the world today has altered.1 Modern interstate warfare differs from other kinds of political violence in many ways, not least because its practitioners at least purport to abide by certain conventions. One of these is the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. As Stathis Kalyvas writes, “modernity is inextricably linked with the attempt, however imperfect, to draw a line between combatants and civilians, thus limiting violence to the battlefield.”2 The task of warfare was delegated to professional armies who represented 1. For more on the decline of major war, see John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca , N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Wayman, and J. David Singer, “Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816–1997,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 1 (March 2003): pp. 49–70; Steve Chan, “In Search of a Democratic Peace: Problems and Promise,” Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (May 1997), pp. 59–91; Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, “From Democratic Peace to Kantian Peace: Democracy and Conflict in the International System,” in Manus Midlarsky, ed., Handbook of War Studies II, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 93–128; Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001); and James Lee Ray, “A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Peace Research Program,” in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 205–243. 2. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 54. 2 | rethinking violence populations that generally remained on the sidelines. Historians have suggested that attitudes about the use of violence changed between 1700 and the twenty-first century, “with a growing antipathy toward cruelty of all kinds” and attempts to limit the ubiquity of warfare in everyday life.3 This image of interstate warfare as a contest between states carried out via rival armies was never entirely accurate; civilian populations have been targeted with violence in interstate wars and have fought in irregular campaigns that accompanied conventional wars.4 But conventional interstate war is characterized by the presence of armed forces attacking one another across established front lines.5 And violence in conventional war is primarily the duty of disciplined, uniformed professionals acting on behalf of the state. In the twenty-first century, much of the political violence that we witness looks quite different from conventional war. Collective violence no longer primarily concerns contests between the armies of major states, in which soldiers are the main violent actors. Instead, civilians are often the targets of violence, its practitioners, or both. Episodes of political violence pit the state against segments of the citizenry, often defined in religious, ethnic, and national terms. Non-state actors within states have in turn launched violent challenges to the state, attacking representatives of state power, state symbols, and state institutions, but typically seeking to avoid direct combat with state armies. Insurgents, terrorists, and rioters are thus unlike the trained, regimented forces of major wars, not simply because they are different kinds of actors, but because the very nature of warfare they employ differs. These types of violent conflicts are hardly new, but the reduction in the incidence of major, interstate warfare has served to turn scholars’ attention to conflict among domestic actors and prompted a renewed interest in the study of unconventional conflict.6 Despite increasing scholarly attention, violence between states and non-state actors remains puzzling in several regards. First, states’ ostensible raison d’être is to provide security and govern populations; it is star3 . See David Garland, Punishment and Modern...