Constituencies of conflict and opportunity: Land rights,narratives and collective action in Darfur

Grievance-based narratives are a primary component of civil wars. While present among the general population affected by conflict, the variants held by the segment of the population most proximate to the armed factions – constituencies – play a primary role in the development and conduct of a conflict. Such narratives can coalesce around specific volatile issues and enable non-combatant constituencies to participate in the conflict through the use of specific 'legalities' or legal precepts. These legalities facilitate the engagement of sets of collective action that are opposed to those derived by constituencies of the opposing side. However such constituencies and their narratives are also where potential opportunity resides for peace-building, both during and subsequent to hostilities. This article looks at the case of Darfur to examine these ingredients, with a focus on land rights as the volatile set of issues around which narratives have developed. In Darfur, opposed narratives which maintain how and why groups claim and deserve access to land and territory, and how groups were unjustly displaced or excluded from lands (and hence power), became solidified and acted upon prior to the conflict to become a primary driver in the current war. In certain cases however narrative change has led to interaction between members of opposed constituencies for the purpose of exploring cooperative arrangements.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

Courses of Conflict: Transmission of Knowledge and War's History in Eastern Sri Lanka

After three decades of armed confrontations, the Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009 with the military defeat of the liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). To sustain the war for so long, mechanisms of knowledge reproduction were used legitimizing violence and assuring the conflict's transmission across the generations involved in it. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork in the island's Eastern Province, this article addresses the processes through which Sri Lanka's war-history has been taught and learnt, empirically linking the multiple sites of knowledge transfer. It suggests a trajectory moving from the institutional (policy and textbooks) to the defiant (specific schools and armed movements) spaces of transmission, while comparing the attitudes, memories of violence and transmission strategies of educators, students and former combatants. The data are embedded within the broader discussions on social change and the cultural reproduction of war, a process illustrated with the help of a new concept: semantic alliances.     

Forging political entrepreneurs: Civil war effects on post-conflict politics in Italy

How does violent mobilization affect post-conflict elections? This article studies the impact that violent collective mobilization has on local electoral behavior after domestic conflict. We argue that post-conflict democratic politics at the local level can be dramatically affected by local experience of civil war. The use of violence during the war and especially local political entrepreneurs who have emerged from the conflict can influence post-violent politics. We use as case-study the civil war that took place in Italy during the last phase of World War II. Using new spatially disaggregated data on armed groups' location and violent episodes, we assess the impact of the violent mobilization on the 1946 elections, which took place after the conflict. We find that partisans' mobilization and, more weakly, Nazi-Fascist violent acts influenced local politics, shifting votes towards more radical positions. Our findings hold across numerous robustness checks.     

Editorial

Abstract

During this last century war has taken more lives and wrought more damage than in all of human history. Its persistence - with over a hundred armed conflicts on the scale of ‘war’ raging in the last decade - prompts a search for causes, since diagnosis comes before a cure. Many fingers point to the stress of poverty as a major contributing factor, but both anecdotal and modelling approaches reveal that poverty has not been and is not now a significant proactive or enabling factor: if poverty were to become a thing of the past there would be no assurance that wars would be eliminated or even significantly reduced. Poverty is associated with societal stress and with sporadic and endemic societal violence, but stress does not lead to war or play a major role in enabling the rise to power of war prone leaders and their associated elites unless other factors are at play. The causal factors conducive to war making are varied but all are characterised by tribal, religious, and ethnic rivalries that political leaders exploit to mobilise support for war, and/or by the lust for money or hegemonic power of the political leadership. It is exceptionally difficult to prevent the rise of leaders who, for various self-serving reasons, are able to gain power and are prone to pursue policies leading to war. The way to thwart these ambitions is to create conditions, nationally and internationally, that are inimical to the rise to power of such leaders and, if they do gain power, to make the realisation of their war bent policies too costly to them. At the national level of governance the essential elements of policies to create such war inhibiting conditions are education, especially at the primary level, a free independent media, and a guaranteed protection of political and civil rights - in a phrase, democratic governance. At the international level of governance the support calls for financial and other forms of assistance that would enable national governments to carry through the democracy enhancing programmes and projects related to education and to political and civil rights, and measures to strengthen democratic control of the system of international institutions and to constrain the exercise of national sovereignty in those areas where doing so enhances ‘the global common good’, one key element of which is the radical diminution of international and intrastate wars. Economic and social rights are the other aspects that comprise the concept of ‘human rights’, and, though they are mutually reinforcing, for tactical reasons the struggle to achieve these rights should be pursued on a separate track from the struggle to gain political and civil rights that appear to face less formidable obstacles and could thus, in the short and medium term, progress sufficiently to have a significant impact in reducing the occurrence and intensity of wars.     

Raise your voices! Civilian protest in civil wars

Under what conditions do protests occur in civil wars? Evidence from case studies suggests that protests can indeed play an important role in contexts of civil wars, with civilians using respective tactics both against the state and rebels. We argue that localities experiencing armed clashes are likely to see protest events in the same month. Civilians conduct protests due to battle-related changes in the local opportunity structures and grievances related to losses experienced through collateral damage. Using spatially disaggregated data on protest and battle events in African civil wars, we find support for our hypothesis that battles trigger civilian protests. This effect is robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive list of confounding variables and alternative model specifications, including the use of different temporal and spatial units. Our findings highlight the role of the civilian population and the spatial relationship between war events and protests in civil wars.     

The consequences of internal displacement on civil war violence: Evidence from Syria

How do flows of internally displaced persons (IDPs) affect wartime violence? We argue that government and rebel forces respond to IDP flows in different ways, which condition where and when they employ violence. State responses are driven by the need to identify insurgents and their civilian supporters, and depend on how much information they have about where IDPs are coming from and where they are seeking to resettle. Rebel responses are driven by their need to monitor and control civilian movements, which leads to more violence against civilians in transit areas heavily trafficked by IDPs. Drawing on novel subnational data from Syria, we employ social network analysis to examine migration flow characteristics beyond aggregate IDP inflows and outflows. We find that the greater the local clustering of IDP flows – i.e., the less complex and diverse displacement movements are – the more pro-government combatants are able to detect IDPs’ origins and destinations, and the higher the number of civilian killings. Transit locations, meanwhile, become epicenters of rebel violence against civilians. While scholars have found that more information about civilian behavior causes combatants to employ more selective violence, our results suggest that more information about displacement prompts more collective violence from governments. The findings also indicate that governments respond to IDP flows after movement, whereas rebels respond to IDP flows during movement. This underscores the importance of focusing on how armed groups respond to displacement flows in order to better understand the consequences of population movements in wartime.     

Local determinants of African civil wars, 1970–2001

In large-N investigations, civil conflicts – like any significant political event – tend to be studied and understood at the country level. Popular explanations of why and where civil wars occur, however, refer to such factors as ethnic discrimination, wealth inequalities, access to contrabands, and peripheral havens. The intensity of such factors varies geographically within states. Therefore, any statistical study of civil war that uses country-level approximations of local phenomena is potentially flawed. In this paper, we disaggregate the country and let 100 × 100 km grid cells be the units of observation. Having developed geo-referenced conflict data from Uppsala/PRIO's conflict database, we use GIS to identify regions of peace and conflict and as a tool to generate sub-national measures of key explanatory variables. The results from an empirical analysis of African civil wars, 1970–2001, demonstrate spatial clustering of conflict that co-varies with the spatial distribution of several exogenous factors. Territorial conflict is more likely in sparsely populated regions near the state border, at a distance from the capital, and without significant rough terrain. Conflict over state governance is more likely in regions that are densely populated, near diamond fields, and near the capital city. These promising findings show the value of the innovative research design and offer nuanced explanations of the correlates of civil war.     

Is there a relationship between wartime violence and postwar agricultural development outcomes? The case of concessions and community grants in Mozambique

This paper studies if intensity and recentness of wartime violence is related to the trajectory of post-conflict agricultural development. We consider the case of Mozambique, where the government has made agricultural concessions to corporations, as well as land grants to communities. These uses may stand in competition with one another, and we test if violence affects the awarding of concessions or land grants. We analyze district-level, GIS-generated data on concessions, grants, and civil war events. We find wartime violence intensity is associated with more concessions and fewer grants. We conversely find recentness of violence is associated with fewer concessions and more grants. Embedding our empirical analysis in a community resilience framework, we suggest the intensity of wartime violence may erode local institutions – be they traditional governance structures, or agricultural cooperatives seeking community lands – or limit their access to government bodies and local NGOs tasked with vetting, delimiting, and monitoring proposed concessions. Paradoxically, recentness violence may mobilize those same institutions.     

Nationalism and war commemoration – a Latin American exceptionalism?

Recent scholarship on collective memory and nationalism in Latin America argues that – in sharp contrast to Europe – war commemoration has been of little importance to the memory work of states in the region. The article challenges this claim. A comparative‐historical analysis of school textbooks and school ceremonies in twentieth‐century Mexico, Argentina and Peru reveals that the commemoration of major civil and international wars was central to official national narratives in these countries. The article further identifies important qualitative changes in war commemoration over time, especially with respect to how commemorative discourses portrayed agency and assigned responsibility for military victories and losses. These changes are situated within broader transformations of nationalism and new alignments in the politics of nationhood and memory.     

Politics and social violence in developing democracies: Theory and evidence from Brazil

How do the political institutional features of developing democracies influence how violence occurs? Building on research showing that ‘hybrid democracies’ are more prone to social violence, this article argues that elite competition for power in the context of limited institutional oversight plays an important role in explaining violence. The framework here presents possible mechanisms linking subnational political dynamics and rates of social violence in poorly institutionalised contexts. It highlights how political competition, concentrated political power, and constraints on cooperation can create opportunity structures where violence is incentivised and the rule of law is undermined. This is examined empirically using sub-national homicide data from over 5000 Brazilian municipalities between 1997 and 2010. Findings suggest violence is greater in contexts that are highly competitive – where political actors face credible challenges and have a more tenuous grip on power – and those where power is highly concentrated – where political actors have held power for longer periods or face limited credible challenges. Findings also suggest violence varies depending on whether interactions between state and municipal government are likely to be constrained or cooperative; and are consistent with literatures emphasising the importance of structural explanations of social violence. In light of on-going democratic transitions across the globe, the article highlights the value of understanding links between institutional context, contentious politics and social violence.     

From minefields to minespace: An archeology of the changing architecture of autonomous killing in US Army field manuals on landmines,booby traps and IEDs

Since WWI, militaries and armed groups have used remote and autonomous explosive traps – landmines, booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – as a kind of deadly architecture to reengineer terrain inhospitable. Until recently, minefields remained analog, static, and fixed. But technological development and changes in the nature of war have made remote and autonomous violence increasingly mobile, dynamic, and robotic and, rather than being contained in a bounded Cartesian plane, diffused through the very spaces and flows that sustain civilian life. Such “unmanned” weapons are increasingly able to navigate, communicate with each other, identify targets and even kill with minimal human involvement. Mirroring broader changes in the spatial configurations of war, the architectural form of remote and autonomous killing is thus shifting from the two-dimensional minefield to multi-dimensional minespace. This poses challenges to those engaged in humanitarian efforts to demilitarize space. To illustrate these changes, the paper draws on Derek Gregory's notion of “Everywhere War” and engages in a discursive “archeology” of the minefield as described by US Army mine, booby trap and IED warfare field manuals.     

Producing the military urban(s): Interoperability,space-making,and epistemic distinctions between military services in urban operations

Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.     

Italians at war: war and experience in Fascist Italy

This article examines Fascist violence in war from the perspective of the strategies employed by the Italian army. Focusing on the military’s use of violence from the re-conquest of Libya to the civil war in Italy, the article argues that Fascism systematically employed forms of violence that were both typical and original.     

War and city size: The asymmetric effects of the Spanish Civil War

Populations are affected by shocks of different kinds, and wars, a priori, may be among the most prominent. This article studies the effect of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) shock on the distribution of population, especially on cities. One of the main contributions of this study is that it underlines the importance of distinguishing between winning and losing sides, an aspect which until now has been largely overlooked. While previous research on war shocks has also tended to be concerned with inter-state wars, this paper concentrates on a civil war. We take advantage of a new, long-term, annual data set. Our results show that, overall, the Spanish Civil War did not have a significant effect on city growth. However, we also find a significant and negative effect in the growth of cities that aligned themselves with the losing side. These results are robust to heterogeneity in the effect of the war shock, measured as war severity and duration. Although short lived, the temporary effect on growth results in a permanent effect on the size of cities on the losing side.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

Techniques of seigneurial war in the fourteenth century

Despite the many studies devoted to medieval military history, most work has concentrated on royal wars, neglecting the petty seigneurial wars that made up most of the large-scale, organised violence of the middle ages. This article, based on judicial records for dozens of seigneurial wars waged in fourteenth-century southern France, shows that lords' tactics were not keeping up with those of royal commanders. Although royal wars increasingly involved large numbers of foot soldiers, large siege engines, and artillery, local lords' bureaucratic and financial limitations restricted their adoption of new techniques. As had been the case for centuries, most lords' wars were focused on causing economic damage and affective trauma through raiding. After the first phase of the Hundred Years War, local lords began to employ significant numbers of mercenaries, allowing them to wage war more frequently and perhaps making their wars more violent, a development which partly reflects the economic pressures of the period.     

Protest Cycle,Political Violence and Social Movements in the Basque Country

A close look at the groups, organisations and social movements among which a terrorist organisation seeks refuge and support, will provide a fundamental and strategic view of its evolution. By means of the concept of a protest cycle, I analyse the relationship between political violence and social movements in the Basque Country. With the help of Tarrow's fundamental variables in the political structure, to which I have added the degree of consciousness‐raising and mobilisation in civil society, I aim to study the protest cycle of ETA's violence from its social origins at the start of the 1960s, through its consolidation in the 1970s, to its decline from the mid‐1980s onwards. The idea I will defend is that political violence should be seen as a form of collective action directed towards a mobilisation of society, and that its vicissitudes depend on the structure of interactions set up between the armed organisation, social movements and civil society.