Re-examining the State/Non-State Binary in the Study of (Civil) War

ABSTRACT

One of the fundamental distinctions informing studies on civil war is that between state and non-state actors as parties to an armed conflict. As we argue, however, this binary has recently come under increased scrutiny in light of real-world developments in armed conflicts. The article builds on newer scholarly contributions that have exposed the porous boundaries between state and non-state actors and orders while demonstrating a striking convergence in their behaviour. Drawing on examples from conflict zones in West Asia and North Africa, we investigate phenomena in civil wars that uncover the tenuity of state/non-state distinction.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their comments on earlier versions of this article: Bear Braumoeller, who died briefly after we last met him and whom the academic community misses dearly, Stathis Kalyvas, Jonas Wolff and the participants of the first Annual Conference of the Regional Research Center ‘Transformations of Political Violence’ (TraCe) on ‘The Language(s) of Violence’ on 1 and 2 March 2023 in Frankfurt. We also received very helpful feedback about our ideas from Constantin Ruhe and Tobias Wille. Finally, two very substantial and benevolent reviews helped us revise our article, improve its structure and strengthen our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sometimes also the terms government/non-government are used.

2. https://ucdp.uu.se/, https://correlatesofwar.org/ [accessed 25/08/23].

3. Field observation from May 2023.

4. The term ‘hybrid’ has also played a prominent role in the discussion of military strategies, such as ‘hybrid warfare’, for instance to describe the blending of peace and war (Chivvis 2017) or of ‘conventional’ and ‘irregular’ or ‘guerrilla’ military methods (Biddle 2021). Finally, ‘hybrid’ is also used to describe the repertoire of armed non-state actors beyond violence, with pertinent WANA examples including Hamas (Gunning 2008) and Lebanese Hezbollah, which not only use violence but also political and religious means (Azani 2013). In all cases, however, the term ‘hybrid’ is contested in the literature and rarely conceptualised as a distinct actor type. An example of an actual ‘third’ type was the hybrid regime type that was introduced to the debate on democratic and authoritarian regimes (Bogaards 2009).

5. One could even say that Hezbollah truly is both a strong non-state actor and a weak state actor. The former gains its strength through the weakness of the latter and by using its ‘non-state’ means to control the state and its ‘state’ means to secure the future of a ‘non-state’ existence. But the Lebanese ‘state’ – as embedded in international relations and re-produced through the practice of other state and non-state actors – simultaneously shapes the trajectories and forms that the ‘non-state’ actor can take, thereby socialising Hezbollah as a non-state actor that is supposedly able to control the state, as, for instance, visible in the party’s ‘Lebanonisation’ (Worrall et al. 2015, Saouli 2018). Hezbollah, then, is the example par excellence for the co-evolutionary, deeply permeable and contingent nature of the state/non-state binary. We thank the editors of this Special Issue for pointing this out to us.

6. James Worrall (2017, p. 711) proposes a helpful definition of orders as ‘set(s) of predictable behaviours, structured by widely known and accepted rules which govern regular human interactions and behaviours’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under Grant Number [01UG2203B].

Notes on contributors

Hanna Pfeifer

Hanna Pfeifer is Professor of Political Science with a Focus on Radicalisation and Violence Research at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). She is Principal Investigator at the Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence (TraCe) and the Research Initiative ConTrust: Trust in Conflict – Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty, as well as head of the Research Group on Terrorism at PRIF. Before coming to Frankfurt, she worked as a research associate at Helmut Schmidt University/the University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge with a research fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Her research is centred on the dynamics of violent and non-violent politics of ordering, particularly in the context of interactions between state and non-state entities in West Asia and North Africa. Additionally, her expertise extends to German foreign and security policy. Her scholarly contributions have been featured, among others publications, in Small Wars & Insurgencies, Foreign Policy Analysis, German Politics and Politics and Religion. She is co-editor (with Anna Geis and Maéva Clément) of the volume Armed Non-state Actors and the Politics of Recognition (Manchester University Press, 2021). Her book Islamists and the Global Order: Between Resistance and Recognition is forthcoming (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

Regine Schwab

Regine Schwab is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Regional Research Center Transformations of Political Violence (TraCe) at Goethe University Frankfurt and at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). She works on non-state armed groups in internationalised armed conflict, with a regional specialisation on the MENA region. She is particularly interested in the structures and institutions these actors (re)build, their interaction with other groups, including civilians and external actors, ideological changes and violence against civilians. She received her PhD in 2021 from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research has been published, among others, in the Journal of Global Security Studies, Small Wars & Insurgencies and Terrorism and Political Violence.