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Progovernment Militias
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Sociologists, political scientists, and economists have long emphasized the benefits of monopolizing violence and the risks of failing to do so. Yet recent research on conflict, state failure, genocide, coups, and election violence suggests governments cannot or will not form a monopoly. Governments worldwide are more risk acceptant than anticipated. They give arms and authority to a variety of nonstate actors, militias, vigilantes, death squads, proxy forces, paramilitaries, and counterbalancing forces. We develop a typology based on the links of the militia to the government and to society as a device to capture variations among these groups. We use the typology to explore insights from this emerging literature on the causes, consequences, and puzzling survival of progovernment militias and their implications for security and human rights, as well as to generate open questions for further research.
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“Often, the violence is 'outsourced' to pro-government militias (Carey and Mitchell 2017).”
From Dynamics and Logics of Civil War (2017) · cites this paper as Carey and Mitchell 2017
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Metadata
- Authors
- Carey, S. C., & Mitchell, N. J.
- Affiliations
- University of Mannheim (DE)
- University College London (GB)
- Venue
- Annual Review of Political Science
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 2017-05-11
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 127-147
- ISSN
- 1094-2939 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-1577
- OpenAlex
- W4229978044
- Cited by
- 106
- References
- 101
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 4
- FWCI
- 2.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- other-oa
- Locations
- Annual Review of Political Science (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- MADOC (University of Mannheim) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/E011756/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Peacebuilding and International Security
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Military and Defense Studies
- Keywords
- state monopoly of violence, state failure, vigilante, death squads, proxy forces, paramilitary groups, coups d'état, electoral violence, security, human rights
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