Search

PLEASE EMAIL ME FOR A COPY OF THIS PAPER AT DIPALI80@GMAIL.COM. IT WILL BE UPLOADED TO THIS WEBSITE DURING THE CONFERENCE AS WELL.The post-conflict state rests in a precarious space, not quite mired in war yet far removed from lasting peace. Armed and powerful non-state actors often reside within its territory and are typically viewed as obstacles to the reconstruction of a stable, functioning state. The challenges posed to the state-building process by these actors are not new; instead, the political climate around them has changed. This paper will examine the role of armed non-state actors within the post-conflict state in the nebulous divide between war and peace, where their scope for growth is immense and the trajectory of the state is uncertain. During periods of instability and violent change, how can we characterize the function and approach of these actors and their relationships with the larger political context? Lessons for the modern post-conflict period may reside in the history of these kinds of actors and their relationships with organic state-building processes of the past. After all, as Charles Tilly has famously argued, there have been strong, if not deliberate, links between the waging of war and the building of states. The paper, therefore, will draw directly on the histories of various state-building processes that involved a prominent role for armed non-state actors who maintained spheres of political, economic and military control within the state. Many of these actors had a profound influence on the state's ultimate formation. As several scholars have described, the non-state armed actor historically represented both an instrument of and a menace to centers of power throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The complex and often schizophrenic relationships formed by warlords, bandits, mafiosi and the like with the fledgling state contributed to a persistent kind of insecurity that dominated the political landscape for quite some time. In the modern context, post-conflict environments like Somalia and Afghanistan face a similar challenge, yet the roles of these non-state actors (both debilitating and constructive) have not been sufficiently examined or understood. More precisely, this paper will argue that to characterize their involvement as only opportunistic and damaging is to offer an analytically limited paradigm. Instead, because of the time, challenges and ambiguities involved in traveling the continuum from war to peace, an important and complicated role for these actors in the intermediate stages of post-conflict state-building may be natural. Might they, in fact, have an undeniable role to play in helping to shepherd the post-conflict state through an inevitable period of persistent insecurity? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]