For the first time in its modern history, the post-2003 state faced a severe legitimation crisis, which was compounded by its inability to establish the authority to dominate. Chapter 4 argues that the fragmentation of the state’s authority resulted from the undoing of its domination capacity by the US-led invasion during the first three months of the occupation. The extent of the fragmentation was plain to see in 2003 when militia-backed political groups moved into the space where the state used to be – by the end of the 2006 civil war, those groups had firmly consolidated their demarcated domains of authority over Iraq’s economy and politics. The chapter investigates the Coalition Provisional Authority’s biggest civil project: repairing the national electrical grid. Technical and material elements of that project became sites of physical and political contestation over the state’s consolidation at a moment when its domination had disappeared. The chapter also traces the trajectory of “state-building” as an influential and ultimately dangerous framework, from its roots in 1980s US academia and 1990s UN peace-keeping practices to its arrival in Iraq with the US-led invasion.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the material scope of NIAC and is divided into seven sections. The first explores the material concepts of NIAC pursuant to both CA3 and APII,  and explores how the drafters understood these  concept and how it has been interpreted in practice. Second, it examines the concept of NIAC contained in Additional Protocol II of 1977, looking at how its distinct identity emerged, as well as its specific material elements. The second section explores some of the legal and operational challenges that arise from the existence of two categories of NIAC, and in particular how the activation of APII can fragment the applicable legal regime, resulting in fluctuating levels of protection during NIAC. The fourth section undertakes a comparative analysis of the material scope and associated threshold of NIAC pursuant to the Tadić definition of NIAC (CA3) and that contained in APII, in order to identify areas of convergence and divergence. The fifth section explores how developments in both customary and conventional IHL applicable during NIAC have influenced its material scope and, in particular, the level of organization armed groups require in order to qualify as a Party to a NIAC. Following from the conclusions of sections four and five, the sixth section assesses the continued relevance of the distinction between CA3 and APII NIACs in practice.

Irregular war, like war, remains an enduring feature of security studies both as they relate to internal state security and sovereignty as well as to international relations. Irregular war may not always appear to hold political purposes; many today seem driven by religious ideology, but the institution of theocratic governance has a politics of its own. Thus, like regular war, irregular war is subordinate to a political purpose. Whether they occur on the periphery of regular wars or perform roles to keep state competition from escalating into conflict, irregular wars are often intricately tied to their regular counterparts. While two broad theories of counterinsurgency both claim to have prescriptions for winning an irregular fight, one – the good governance approach – is plagued by problems of implementation at the governmental level, and the other – coercion – entails unreasonable brutality against both insurgent and population, often unbefitting a liberal counterinsurgent force.

Why did the British war effort in the South fail so badly, and therefore lead to the British loss of the American mainland colonies? The British tried to solve the political problem of reunification through military means, which was always a poor fit. Further, the British continuously underrated their allies and did not use them effectively. These mistakes doomed the British war effort in the South. The region dissolved into a brutal civil war fought through guerrilla means. Neither side could win complete victory. Mistakes compounded, making British victory impossible.

The Taliban insurgency happened because they enjoyed a permissive environment: safe haven in Pakistan, state failure in Afghanistan, and an America increasingly focused on Iraq. In turn, most of those had common roots in the Bush administration’s decisions in 2001: to define the conflict as a “War on Terror” best waged with a light footprint and to conflate the Taliban and al-Qaida. Some of those decisions made sense in 2001, but none of them bore scrutiny as the situation in Afghanistan changed, and the Bush administration failed to adapt quickly enough.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States further propelled the global focus on terrorism. Despite international efforts, the threat of terrorism remains throughout the world. In this chapter, the challenges in defining and analyzing terrorism are established by articulating the characteristics, structures, and motivations of groups that terrorize others. These definitions of terrorism, and the features of relevant groups, are then placed within the wider context of intrastate conflict. Key questions addressed include: Why does terrorism more frequently occur in war-torn countries? And how does its occurrence lower prospects for sustainable peace? This analysis is then used to inform modern counterterrorism methods, and how their evolution is critical for future international and national security along with peace mediation studies.

In this chapter we locate the question of ‘radical pedagogy’ in the current moment: a time in which insurgent social movements (such as #rhodesmustfall, #metoo, and #blacklivesmatter) are raising pertinent questions of representation, accountability and justice in society as well as at universities. We reflect on our own pedagogical-scholarly practice, and ask whether it is possible to separate language activism from other kinds of social-justice/decolonial/anti-colonial activism. In answering this question we draw on the Black racial tradition(s), and we emphasize the importance of being attuned to one’s local context. In our case this means the settler-colonial realities of post-apartheid South Africa, and the Imperial university. Being an activist-scholar means that one has to be prepared to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, with other scholars, but also with students and the wider community. These are conversations that are grounded in a willingness to ‘unlearn’ and to engage in ‘dialogics’ (Paolo Freire, 1968). One area where these ‘difficult conversations’ have gained traction is around questions of citation and curriculum: How can we teach and use citation practices that are ethically responsible? Can we develop an ethics of citation, and create a curriculum that is ethically sound?

This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.

The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

In the moments before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, nationalists in what is now the Indian state of Nagaland declared their own region independent. The Naga claim is key to understanding postcolonial state-making in the decolonizing world because it represented the limits of what could be an independent state in an era of seeming nationalist possibility. A Nagaland articulated the boundaries of national self-determination by demonstrating the practical restrictions of an international system in which national self-determination remained an aspiration rather than a right. Postcolonial state-making foreclosed the prospect of international recognition for many nationalist claimants, yet sovereignties that can only be seen outside the lens of their ruling state government persisted, even as they held conflicting claims of statehood.

The message of the Cuban Revolution for a generation of young Latin American leftists was to put aside reformist politics and take up arms. North Korea vowed to support all those who heeded that call. Its intervention came at a time when many young radicals sought a personal transformation, one that would allow them to participate in the crucial historical juncture they believed themselves to be living through. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Latin American militants sought this transformation in secret training camps in North Korea, with the hope of returning to their home countries new subjects, with the physical and mental attributes necessary to make revolution. Between 1964 and 1970, North Korea provided military training to at least nine revolutionary groups in seven Latin American countries: Venezuela, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, and Mexico. This chapter provides an in-depth overview and assessment of North Korea’s efforts to support revolutionary struggle in Latin America.

Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult for major powers to translate battlefield victories into favourable political outcomes. As a result, US military engagements in the Middle East, Russian engagements in its “near abroad” and in Syria, French engagements in sub-Saharan Africa, and the African Union’s war in Somalia have turned into protracted missions with little prospect of decisive victory. This chapter examines the phenomenon of “endless war,” asking why it has become so difficult to bring wars to an end and what can be done about it. It shows that the problem is global, rooted in the changing nature, purposes, and attitudes of war. As wars become less about resolving disputes between states and more about the internal composition of states, and as those contests become ever more internationalized, the capacity of actors to sustain war have increased while incentives to pursue peace have declined. The first part examines the “endless war” thesis that grounds the problem in US liberal hegemony. The second part offers a brief explanation of factors that extend a war’s duration and inhibit peace. The third discusses how these issues might be addressed.

Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.