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.

Introduction

Distinctions are a vital tool we use to make sense of and navigate through the social world. They are a basic element in social sciences, used for creating definitions, designing typologies and collecting data. One – if not the key – distinction in the study of civil wars is that between state and non-state actors. This distinction is binary: actors are coded as either state or non-state. Here a state is usually defined as a fixed territorial entity with a given population that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and its sovereignty as well as authority are internationally recognised (Weber 1946, p. 78). In a situation of intra-state conflict, this monopoly is challenged from within by at least one non-state actor that resorts to the use of force – as opposed to an inter-state war that places one state against another (Sarkees 2014). As such, coding conflict parties as either ‘state’ or ‘non-state’ actors¹ constitutes a basic step in research on armed conflict. The classification ascribed to an actor also implies expectations as to their behaviour in terms of war and governance – that is, the strategies and tactics they employ. Finally, the state/non-state distinction helps guide assessments of structures and institutions created by these actors and through their interactions – generally conceptualising of the state as the ‘normal’ order in opposition to either the disorder of war or the temporally and spatially bounded ‘governance’ or ‘rule’ of non-state actors during conflict.

This article revisits the state/non-state binary in its role as a fundamental and consequential distinction underlying qualitative and quantitative approaches to the study of armed conflict. In recent years, several debates point to a reality that is more grey than necessarily black and white in relation to state and non-state actors, behaviours and orders – many of which have been prominently addressed in Civil Wars. This includes investigations into a variety of armed non-state actors (Jentzsch 2017) that provide different types of governance under conditions of armed conflict (Furlan 2020) as well as those characterised by ‘multi-layered governance’ in which other (non-)state actors provide regulation, goods and services (Kasfir et al. 2017) – thereby questioning the notion that the state is the single provider of governance and order. Other studies have demonstrated that, even at a normative level, non-state actors can compete with the state, for instance by seeking and gaining legitimacy (Schlichte and Schneckener 2015, Terpstra and Frerks 2017). Even more programmatically, some contributions have mapped the ‘order turn’ in the study of civil war (Waterman and Worrall 2020). In this article, we continue de- and reconstructive work on social and political order(s) under conditions of civil war by scrutinising the problems of the state/non-state dichotomy and seeking viable alternatives.

At an ontological level, the distinction ‘state’ vs. ‘non-state’ actors is not entirely straightforward. Empirically, parties involved in an armed conflict can often not simply be attributed to one category or the other. Moreover, the behaviour of the actors identified as either state or non-state often converges to a considerable degree. Taken together, this poses a challenge to classifying political orders that survive, emerge and stabilise in (post-)conflict settings as either ‘state’ or ‘non-state’. While not limited to West Asia and North Africa (WANA), civil wars in this region have been well studied and they are particularly notable in terms of escaping the state/non-state dichotomy. At a practical level, this is also the region with which we are most familiar from our own empirical research.

In the following, we consolidate recent advances in the area of conflict studies in WANA, arguing that a binary distinction between either state or non-state cannot account for (numerous) empirical realities of civil wars here. Recent examples from this region suggest that thinking in terms of ‘both-and’, ‘more-or-less’ and ‘variety within’ the state and non-state categories can help us better grasp armed conflicts. This is not to argue against the existence of the state nor against its validity as an academic category. There is normative appeal related to the privileges of being (legally and politically) recognised as a state – its reproduction and normalisation as a form of political community and its firm anchoring in international law and institutions sustain the state’s practical relevance for actors involved in real-world politics, including for academic analysts. However, a significant amount of the empirical reality drawn from current conflicts are no longer adequately described by the ‘state’ versus ‘non-state’ binary.

This study is organised as follows: The next section reviews attempts, both in conflict studies and related disciplines, to deconstruct ‘the state’ (and the ‘non-state’) – showing how persistent this category remains due to its use in political and legal practice as well as in academic analysis. In the three main sections of this article, we discuss three challenges to the binary distinction, along with potential solutions. First, at the actor level, we demonstrate that some conflict realities in WANA eschew categorisation in the terms of either state or non-state, presenting conceptual alternatives such as hybrid actors, a continuum from non-state to state and a focus on the diversity of subtypes. We discuss how these can help us make sense of certain actors, along with their limitations.

Second, even if we assume that a binary distinction of actors is adequate for describing basic conflict constellations, recent wars in WANA have been marked by considerable convergence between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ behaviour – and we investigate methods of warfighting to illustrate this point. Third, we build on contributions to the vibrant field of rebel governance to highlight continuities between pre- and post-conflict and wartime orders, the co-production of order and the need for relational analyses. We conclude by summarising our arguments and touching on how the state/non-state question and future debates in Civil Wars may further benefit from examining relations and interactions at different levels of analysis – from the local to the global – and drawing comparisons across conflict sites in single as well as multiple countries.

Challenges to the State/Non-state Binary and Its Persistence in Academia, Politics and Law

In the study of armed conflict, the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ is applied to actors, behaviours and orders. Its most significant use, however, is arguably the characterisation of actors constituting parties to a conflict. The state/non-state binary is used for coding these actors, thereby determining how a conflict is categorised: either as a civil/intra-state or inter-state war.

International law draws on four characteristics when defining a state, which are likewise frequently used in academic analyses: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. International recognition is a constitutive feature of sovereign statehood in legal and political practice (Biersteker and Weber 1996, Daase et al. 2015). But, as de jure states demonstrate, this does not necessarily indicate that the recognised entity is concurrently an effective state with the ‘capacity to implement the most basic functions of governance’ (Cambanis et al. 2019, p. 9). As such, there is no straightforward connection between effectiveness and recognition (Grzybowski 2019). Nevertheless, the International Community clearly prioritises international recognition as a prerequisite for statehood. Whenever this is absent, entities that fulfil the criteria of statehood are not categorised as a state, instead they are described as de facto states (Florea 2020). Along with other entities, they are relegated to a residual, collective ‘non-state’ category that is primarily defined ex negativo (Migdal and Schlichte 2005, p. 12).

The present study is interested in armed non-state actors (ANSAs) that possess military capabilities and operate outside the direct hierarchical control of a state. They challenge state authority in the international system through the use of violence as well as other means (Darwich 2021). They cover a broad spectrum of politically and economically motivated groups that are frequently hard to distinguish (Clément et al. 2021, pp. 11–4). At the same time, these can act as a functional equivalent to the state or imitate it. Such political struggles and performances over statehood reaffirm a statist ontology and echo the state/non-state distinction.

This broad dichotomous distinction between state and non-state has come under empirical and conceptual pressure, as well. As Benedetta Berti (2016, p. 6) has observed, the conflict and order dynamics in WANA give reason to doubt ‘the applicability of the state-non-state binary opposition generally theorized in the context of non-state actors in general and non-state armed groups more specifically’. Based on her analysis of actors as diverse as Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS, Berti not only criticises the use of umbrella terms such as ‘non-state armed group’ but also argues that their ‘roles as alternative providers of governance de facto blur the line between state and non-state actor and create an evolving dynamic that simultaneously challenges, contests and redefines concepts like statehood and sovereignty’ (Berti 2016, p. 1).

In related disciplines such as international relations, the 'existence' of the state (and the non-state) has been systematically questioned as an ontological premise. Authors have conceptualised the state as the ontological effect ‘of practices which are performatively enacted’ (Weber 1998, p. 78), proposing a relational approach that exposes the state as diverse, relational practices rather than a unified actor (Bigo 2011). Post-colonial critiques have addressed the universalisation of a particular historic experience through the Westphalian ideal of a nation-state that has never essentially existed in most parts of the world, yet continues to serve ‘as a ubiquitous point of reference’ (Behera 2020, p. 150).

Still, the political and legal practice of identifying states persists and presupposes an ‘ontological commitment to some entities as states, and the relegation of all others to “non-state” status’ (Grzybowski 2019, p. 259). International law operates based on a binary distinction to identify its subjects. It uses the category ‘non-state actors’ for those ‘other than States [that] are gaining an international dimension and significance’ (Kleczkowska 2018, p. 60) – thus becoming relevant for public international law without, however, challenging its state-centric nature. Relatedly, conflict regulation has mostly focused on the obligations of states and less on how non-state actors ought to behave (Jo and Thomson 2014, Fazal and Konaev 2019).

In the study of armed conflict, this binary continues to serve as a default assumption upon which most analyses rest. As we show below, this remains the case despite a certain sense of discomfort found in recent contributions to the field. The persistence of the distinction can be explained by its key role in operationalising and measuring different conflict types in standard data sets – such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program or Correlates of War.² As Meredith Reid Sarkees (2014, p. 239) explains in regard to the latter, the ‘four major types of war [are] delineated primarily by the status of the war participants as states […] or non-state entities’.

In this sense, the state/non-state distinction lies at the core of social science debates on macro-phenomena as well as macro-trends in the evolution of political violence. In fact, key authors in the study of political violence have recently called for further consolidation of the fragmented field by relying even more heavily on the state/non-state distinction: Aiming ‘to cover the entire span of the phenomenon [of political violence] in a way that aims to be analytically productive’, Stathis N. Kalyvas (2019, p. 12) suggests categorising macro-phenomena of political violence ‘along two key dimensions: whether the perpetrator of violence is a state or a non-state actor; and whether the target of violence is a state or a non-state entity’. In qualitative research on conflict and security, as well, the distinction between state and non-state actors is often taken to be a premise rather than an object of investigation. Here interest often lies in studying variance and comparing non-state actors or exploring concepts otherwise reserved for the state in a non-state context (Aydinli 2016, Kruck and Schneiker 2017, Darwich 2021, Geis et al. 2021).

As most researchers are forced, at some point, to determine which kind of actors and, thus, conflicts they are dealing with, the question of definitions and coding rules is critical. Empirical challenges to the accuracy of theoretical categories and coding rules have long been debated, at times leading to a revision of definitions to account for real-world changes or to improve measurement (see, for example, Sambanis 2004, Sarkees and Wayman 2010). The following three sections take this imperative for revision even further. We begin from Berti’s (2016, p. 1) premonition of a ‘mismatch between the organizational evolution of some NSAGs and the conceptual framework adopted to describe and analyze them’, exploring this in the West Asia and North Africa contexts.

The WANA region has witnessed a multitude of armed conflicts over the last one and a half decades, including in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Many of these conflicts constitute internationalised multiparty civil wars characterised by a high number of non-state armed groups as well as a variety of external state and non-state actors directly or indirectly supporting different conflict parties. This patchwork of actors and their interactions expose the limits of the dichotomous state/non-state distinction and point to the need for a conceptual revision. The following section discusses the issue of actor identification in terms of ontological and epistemological ambivalences and three strategies to overcome the binary distinction (as well as their limits): inventing a third hybrid type (both-and), gradual distinctions (more-or-less) and disaggregating the terms ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ into different dimensions and subtypes (variety-within).

Actors: Both State and Non-state, More or Less Stateness, Different Kinds of States and Non-states

While the concept of state and non-state is applied as a clear and binary distinction in international law and institutions, it becomes less convincing when we consider empirical realities in the WANA region, specifically the behaviour and practices of real actors that operate between and blur state and non-state categories. One notable contradiction in this binary distinction arises, for instance, when those involved in a social situation are unable to clearly position themselves as ‘state’ or as ‘non-state’ representatives – or both at the same time.

Apart from being confusing for those involved, this likewise creates an epistemological issue for the academic observer. How does one code territorial control if a checkpoint is co-run by the official army of a state and a pro-government militia, as is the case of a checkpoint on the road from Erbil and Mosul in Northern Iraq?³ Who is the security provider in this situation? While defining a coding rule that sets out a threshold or an if/then relation may seem like a pragmatic solution here, some phenomena elude being coded as either state or non-state. For instance, Iraqi Kataeb Hezbollah has been described ‘as a vanguard network of armed groups under the PMF (Popular Mobilisation Forces) […] [that] has metastasised across the Iraqi body politic’ and that, in ‘everyday practices of politics and economics in Iraq[,] […] [is] indistinguishable from Iraqi state actors across the spectrum’ (Mansour 2021).

This problem is even more apparent in Yemen’s security governance patchwork. Here the Houthis’ capture of the capital Sanaa in 2015 has entailed a takeover of central state security institutions. At the same time, many local security institutions collapsed due to heavy fighting in 2015. The recognised government reinstated official security institutions in 2017 and attempted to unify troops under the ‘National Army’. However, local recruitment into security institutions ended up undermining state power when numerous fighters from ANSAs were hired. Finally, local security institutions have also changed allegiances over the years – at times due to a strategically placed or replaced individual. While we can still identify which security institutions at the local level are formally subordinated to national-level ministries and, thus, the internationally recognised government, many are, in fact, run by non-state actors and can no longer really be considered ‘state’ institutions. Still others are not accepted as security providers that fulfil state functions; as a consequence, these have been replaced by informal institutions that provide security more effectively and are perceived as more legitimate (Transfeld et al. 2022). Against this backdrop, when considering a specific security institution at a specific time and place in Yemen, how can one determine whether they are dealing with a ‘state actor’ or a ‘non-state actor’?

Knowing whether a given institution, individual or action is state or non-state is more than just an epistemological challenge for members of society and researchers. It may also reflect a deeper ontological issue related to what it means for something to be ‘state’ or ‘non-state’. Looking at the genesis of that which presents itself as a ‘non-state actor’ can provide us with more insight into this problem. Besides emerging in reaction to state repression or an exclusion from clientelist networks, ANSAs can be created as a state project ‘when governments or single state agencies […] employ informal, non-regular armed forces they can deploy for objectives that regular forces are unwilling or unable to achieve. In many cases, these informal troops are initially under government control but later develop a life of their own’ (Schlichte 2012, p. 720, emphasis added).

The interesting question, then, is when this life starts, especially for cases in which we find considerable overlap and continuity between (former) state military personnel and the rank and file of a non-state group. ISIS is a pertinent example: While Haji Bakr was the organisation’s intelligence architect and chief of the military council, he formerly served as a colonel under Saddam Hussein (Speckhard and Yayla 2017). Similarly, many of Saddam Hussein’s irregular Fedayeen fighters later joined militant Sunni groups that formed in reaction to the American invasion in 2003. Those actors passed on valuable military expertise (such as building explosive devices), which ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda in Iraq, among other groups (Nance 2015). More generally, WANA autocracies – especially Syria, Egypt and Yemen – used intelligence agencies, internal security arms of the ‘deep state’, the armed forces and street gangs such as the Shabbiha to infiltrate or crush democratic uprisings during the ‘Arab Spring’ (Filiu 2015, esp. chapters 7 and 8).

As these cases elude a clear determination of where the state ends and the non-state actor begins, one strategy is to create a third type that encompasses both state and non-state characteristics, without reducing the analysis to either one. This strategy assumes the ontological distinctiveness and epistemological recognisability of different entities and breaks up the state/non-state binary by adding a hybrid type. And, indeed, policy-makers have employed the term hybrid to describe certain actors in WANA. Without properly theorising the term, these policy-makers used it to capture the ‘almost-state-like’ quality of some actors that ‘are not entirely under the command of the formal government’ (Mansour 2021).⁴ These actors ‘depend on state sponsorship and benefit from the tools and prerogatives of state power but, at the same time, enjoy the flexibility that comes with not being the state’ (Cambanis et al. 2019, pp. ix–x). They also use repertoires usually attributed to states (see next section) such as ‘war, diplomacy, politics, and propaganda’, building constituencies and ‘providing not just security but also services and ideological guidance’ (Cambanis et al. 2019, p. x) and political (proto-)order (see section after next). In a nutshell, they act and look like a state without ‘being a state’. In Iraq, examples include dozens of Shia militias that rose up in 2014 and fought against ISIS together and on behalf of the Iraqi government. In Lebanon, ‘Hezbollah has similarly marked itself as the only reliable protector of the state, even though it exists beyond state control’ (Cambanis et al. 2019, p. 14).

The term ‘hybridity’ has been criticised for veiling the political productions behind it (for example through recognition, see Pfeifer 2021), thereby reproducing the assumption of the neat separability between the ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ realms (Mansour 2021). The hybrid type, as discussed for WANA contexts, tends to constitute a diminished subtype of the state rather than a third category that actually combines characteristics of the state with non-state features. The underlying issue here has to do with the indeterminacy of the term ‘non-state’, which is merely conceived of as a negation of the state rather than an ideal type in its own right. It is too large a category to be meaningful, capturing any actor that is purportedly outside of the state – ranging from small clandestine cells to highly capable actors such as Hezbollah and ISIS. But even the state category seems to encompass rather divergent phenomena, from Western states that approximate the Westphalian ideal to those recognised in Africa and Asia where ‘[n]one of the core constituent features of a sovereign state can consistently be identified throughout [the] long history of state-making […] as much as in Europe or the Americas’ (Behera 2020, pp. 143–6).

The deficiencies inherent to both categories point to a need for other strategies that account for the diversity within each. One answer has been to disaggregate the state into functions and measure degrees of more or less ‘stateness’ – for instance along the dimensions violence control, implementation capacity and empirical legitimacy (Ziaja et al. 2019, pp. 302–3). This can, for example, allow us to distinguish states according to their capacity, designating them as either ‘weaker’ or ‘stronger’. Such an approach must be careful not to fall back into the ‘deficiency traps’ of limited and failed statehood, which has been pointedly criticised (Call 2008, Glawion 2020, p. 4). Moreover, this approach has thus far only been used to further differentiate the state category, not to combine it with the diversity of non-state actors that often fulfil similar functions but have not made it to the club of recognised states.

A more open-ended spectrum of actors rooted in empirical, on-the-ground realities and amenable to any kind of entity or political community could prove useful here. One promising place to start is the Montevideo Convention’s definition of a state (permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states), adapting it to be more open to a variety of political communities. Alternatively, and depending on the research interest, the dimensions considered could be made more specific, referring to the internal organisation of actors or to the functions and capacities generally ascribed to states. ‘State’ and ‘non-state’ actors could subsequently be positioned within a multi-dimensional space, depending on the degree to which they fulfil one or several of these criteria. Such an approach would shed light on any marked differences among different ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors and, more importantly, reveal similarities between entities that have hitherto not appeared within any spectrum of actors. This multidimensional space would comprise entities that fulfil effective statehood criteria and enjoy some degree of political (but not legal) recognition – otherwise referred to as de facto or contested states (Florea 2020, for an overview see, Wille 2023, p. 2, Fn. 4) such as Palestine and Kurdistan-Iraq. Concurrently, it would comprise de jure states that enjoy recognition but may have contested borders or lack effective government, such as Yemen. Finally, it would include governing and territory-holding rebels such as Hezbollah and ISIS that possess similar capacities as ‘weaker’ states.

This final approach would provide a more differentiated understanding the ‘non-state’ concept, as well as combine often disconnected literatures on rebels and quasi-states. Nevertheless, it would fail to account for phenomena that elude neat separation in the first place – discussed above as ‘hybrid’ actors. Despite this, it could help to make sense of certain similarities in the behaviour of actors that we discuss in the next section, that is, the ability to wield force, which is primarily influenced by an actor’s internal organisational politics (essentially comprising the institutions to overcome collective action problems) and its material resources. As we will see in the next section, there is a good deal of convergence between the behaviour of certain ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors.

Behaviour: How ‘State’ and ‘Non-state’ Actors Fight (Alike)

Even assuming that ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors are empirically identifiable, recent developments in civil wars have led to a convergence in the conflict behaviour of at least some state and non-state actors. Here we investigate two behaviours: the delegation of war (or ‘proxy warfare’) and the repertoire of fighting modes. We illustrate this argument by drawing on examples from the WANA region.

Recent WANA conflicts have been highly internationalised, especially those starting post-2010. While neither the involvement of third parties nor the spreading of conflicts across borders is historically new, over the last two decades, an important trend can be observed with regard to the internationalisation of conflict, revolving around the diversification of the actors involved and forms of external support (Meier et al. 2023). These varied actors and relationships bring a renewed focus to surrogate or proxy warfare and the delegation (sub-contracting) of war to ANSAs. This is a general phenomenon that can occur within a state as well as outside of it by external powers sponsoring others to achieving certain aims.

Different kinds of states ranging from great powers to lesser and regional powers play a role in these relationships. What is new, however, is that the latter increasingly act as sponsors for local non-state actors and simultaneously as proxies receiving support from great powers (Karlén et al. 2021, p. 2062). Furthermore, they sometimes serve as intermediaries between powerful states and non-state armed groups (Karlén and Rauta 2023). One example of a small state using such proxies or surrogates to intervene in other conflicts is the UAE and its involvement in Yemen and Libya (Krieg 2023).

At the same time, however, non-state actors take on more varied roles in proxy relationships than often assumed. Traditionally, states play the role of sponsors and non-state actors play the role of proxies. While this model captured most sponsor-proxy relationships during the Cold War and the early post-Cold War period, it is now of limited use for understanding an increasingly complex reality. Assaf Moghadam and Michel Wyss (2020, p. 120, see also Mumford 2013, pp. 45, 57) recently noted that ‘an ideologically and geographically diverse set of nonstate actors has adopted sponsorship roles akin to those traditionally held by states’.

As Reinoud Leenders and Antonio Giustozzi (2022, see also Phillips and Valbjørn 2018) show for pro-government militias in the Syrian war, the relationship between the latter and its external supporter(s) is not exclusive but rather competitive, with different proxies vying for sponsors and vice versa. Finally, these supporters include both state and non-state actors such as Lebanese Hezbollah or Iraqi militias, which co-sponsor or create their own proxies. The proxies themselves also create sub-proxies at times. As noted in a recent report by New America, ‘the new and emergent political economy of conflict has empowered proxies themselves to develop their own proxies’, making today’s non-state actors ‘both principals and agents’ (Rondeaux and Sterman 2019, pp. 50, 51). In effect,

sponsors and proxies no longer unambiguously appear as fully distinct from one another; sponsors, proxies and subsidiaries came to constitute fluid networks connecting and merging numerous actors and organizations involved in counterinsurgency efforts. (Leenders and Giustozzi 2022, p. 623)

As is pertinent for this article, the complex proxy relations further put in question the stark divide between state and non-state actors. Conflict behaviour converges, especially between strong non-state and weak state actors, with both potentially acting as sponsors and proxies, at times even concurrently (Karlén et al. 2021, pp. 2058–60). For state actors with limited military capabilities, ‘utilizing proxies may be one of the few options to project power towards an external enemy or to confront domestic armed opposition groups in remote areas’ (Moghadam and Wyss 2020, p. 127). The case of Iran shows that the sponsorship of military clients can be an effective tool to compete with more powerful foes (Ostovar 2019). Pakistan, which has created the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba to fight Indian control in Kashmir, is another case in point (Crawford and Miscik 2010, pp. 127–8).

Conflict delegation and the use of armed non-state actors for different purposes are not only a sign of weakness but also a means for less powerful states to expand their power (Day and Reno 2014). This renders them quite similar to certain strong non-state actors, as the example of the Lebanese Hezbollah shows: It has been part of the Lebanese government for decades while simultaneously challenging the Lebanese state internally, acting as a regional intervener in its own right and, therefore, clearly representing more than merely an Iranian proxy. In the Syrian war, it has also acted as a co-sponsor of several pro-government militias. As is evident, ‘high-capacity actors such as Hezbollah fall in between the expected behavior of an ideal-typical nonstate sponsor and that of an ideal-typical state sponsor’ (Moghadam and Wyss 2020, p. 125).⁵

Similar to the debate on receiving and granting external support for armed conflict, scholars have started to question the sharp binary between state and non-state actors with regard to modes of warfighting. While non-state armed groups are typically associated with ‘irregular’ warfare (most commonly guerrilla warfare), state actors are thought to use ‘conventional’ warfare such as large troop formations fighting in the open. But in fact, since the middle of the twentieth century, both states and non-state actors have moved toward ‘midspectrum’ warfighting methods, between the ‘empirically rare extrema’ of guerrilla (‘Fabian’) and conventional (‘Napoleonic’) warfare (Biddle 2021, pp. 7–8).

This development means different things for state and non-state actors. In terms of the former, some states have adopted more irregular military methods primarily associated with guerrilla warfare – utilising high degrees of stealth, dispersion and intermingling with civilians – as well as a lack of decisive engagement over territory or a clear frontline (Biddle 2021, p. 36). One sign of this increasing ‘irregularisation’ is that nearly two-thirds of states involved in counterinsurgency operations since 1989 have been supported by non-regular forces, such as militias (Stanton 2015, p. 899) or private military forces. Some states have also covertly sponsored terrorist and other clandestine groups as a foreign policy tool (Ostovar 2019).

Concerning non-state actors, a move to the middle of the blended spectrum of warfighting methods means that some have adopted more conventional methods such as fighting in the open, seeking decisive military engagement over territorial control, concentrating forces, employing heavy weapons and using a spatially differentiated theatre of war (Biddle 2021, p. 37). This shift has been aided by wider access to lethal weapon systems – once only available to governments – which has essentially levelled the material playing field between states and non-state actors and led to a combining of irregular methods with high-tech weapons (Kilcullen 2020, Stoddard 2023).

Some non-state actors such as ISIS are capable of employing conventional warfare methods. The group acquired a considerable conventional arsenal by looting military bases especially in Iraq and Syria. This included over 200 tanks and 60 armoured and infantry fighting vehicles from the Syrian military in 2015 as well as Soviet infantry fighting vehicles, US tanks, American and Chinese artillery, and various air defence systems including American Stingers (Ashour 2021, pp. 42, 85). Notably, ISIS also demonstrated that it could shift between conventional warfare, innovatively combining it with guerrilla warfare and terrorism. According to Omar Ashour (2021), this explains the remarkable military successes that ISIS was able to achieve in various conflict contexts from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Egypt.

Similarly, the Houthis in Yemen have switched from guerrilla warfare (their dominant fighting method during their wars against the Yemeni government and Saudi Arabia between 2004 and 2010) to more conventional means since 2014 that extend the war beyond their base in North Yemen. In parallel, however, the Houthis have adopted ‘long-distance guerrilla warfare’ towards targets in the Gulf States. As the main external intervening party, Saudi Arabia seems to have adapted to these changes by using increasingly unconventional fighting modes since 2015, as well (Mutschler and Bales 2023, pp. 12–8).

Order: Continuous, Multi-Layered and Relational

As the similarities suggest, an important desiderate for research involves comparatively investigating the determinants of behaviour across the state/non-state divide – necessitating a more integrated study of civil and interstate war (Cunningham and Lemke 2013, Biddle 2021). Recent research on such behavioural similarities has looked into attempts actors have made to govern and order spaces and populations under their control. In the debate surrounding rebel governance, striking parallels have been revealed between state and non-state ordering behaviour in armed conflict, as well as continuity with their respective pre- and post-war orders (for an overview, see Pfeifer and Schwab 2023). Different ANSAs have been investigated in their role as co-producers of order alongside the state – which range from competing, cooperating or co-governing with the latter (Berti 2023).

Importantly, the study of rebel governance has further contributed to the ‘decoupling of order from the state’ (Waterman and Worrall 2020, p. 570) and to the disassociation of civil war from disorder. The ‘order turn’ (Waterman and Worrall 2020, p. 569) in the study of civil wars has the potential to take the debate beyond ‘ordering’, as a behaviour incumbent to ‘state and non-state actors’. While rebel governance offers numerous insights into the behaviour of ANSAs beyond violence, these actors have been analysed in terms of their functional similarity to the state, thereby promoting a depoliticised understanding of rebel governance (Pfeifer and Schwab 2023).

The concept of order can provide a more political understanding of structures that persist, transform and emerge during wartime – they do not simply ‘collapse’ or abruptly end when war begins. Rather, what we often find is a considerable degree of continuity in behavioural norms and practices from the pre- to post-war period (Worrall 2017, p. 710). As Steven Heydemann (2018) notes, practices of wartime economic governance in Libya, Syria and Yemen (marked by corruption, predation and crony capitalism) are not only characterised by a high degree of continuity with the pre-war order: the recognised governments (‘states’) have ‘cultivated vast semi-autonomous, nonstate economic networks’ (practically an economic equivalent of paramilitary forces), whereas non-state actors run important aspects of economic governance and have ‘adopted the economic norms and practices of the regimes they seek to displace’ (Heydemann 2018, pp. 56–7). Together, they produce a wartime economic order that is marked by ‘fragmented, “translocal” markets’ (Heydemann 2018, p. 57).

Put differently, Heydemann finds that empirical evidence casts doubt on the assumption ‘that state-based forms of economic governance are distinct from those constructed by insurgents’ (Heydemann 2018, p. 51). In fact, as numerous commentators have noted, the Syrian state has almost completely disaggregated into armed militias, military-business networks and competing family networks, rendering it much more similar to some non-state actors (Decina and Nazemi 2019). Nonetheless, the Syrian government/state has never lost international recognition as such, and its status was recently boosted by being re-admitted into the Arab League after a 12-year suspension (Karahamad and Schwab 2023).

The lines between state/non-state are not only blurry when we consider a given order in the here and now (at a certain point in time and space); analyses of conflict sometimes work on the basis of an imagined sequence of order, where the former state order is followed by the war (dis-)order and results in a new state order. But, as a diachronic perspective of conflict reveals, orders are inseparably entangled across time and they do not start from zero (Worrall 2017, p. 716). Normative and institutional orders and social configurations persist, thereby rendering ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ orders less distinguishable from one another. Continuities may concern institutional legacies for (Arjona 2016, p. 160) and of rebel governance (Podder 2014, Kao and Revkin 2021). Pre-conflict state-society relations, including elite networks, influence rebel rule (Mampilly 2011, pp. 71–2).

Moreover, the acceptance of the social contract proposed by rebels depends heavily on how civilians perceive of the pre-war order and/or the rule of the incumbent regime in another place. Mara Redlich Revkin (2021b) shows this for ISIS in the Iraqi context: ISIS was able to benefit from the state’s weak legitimacy, especially with regard to institutions such as the police and courts. It gained support for these institutions more easily (at least temporarily) – until ISIS officials became corrupt and began to abuse their power (Revkin 2021b). Similarly, she argues that the incumbent regime’s performance played a role in civilians deciding to stay or flee Mosul under occupation. One reason for those who decided to remain was a perception that the goods and services provided by ISIS were of a higher quality than those of the central government – at least during the initial phase of the occupation (Revkin 2021a). Apart from showing that the legitimacy of rebel rule is relational and must be analysed relative to other ‘offers’, Revkin's work also suggests that some of the standards and norms by which rule is evaluated prove relatively stable across time and space in a given context.

Orders may be rather persistent in this manner, and they are re-produced through practice. Importantly, the debate on rebel governance has demonstrated that orders are co-produced and that governance is co-provided by various actors simultaneously, underlining the need for relational analyses. Recent contributions to the debate have called for widening the analytical scope of ‘multi-layered governance’ studies to include not only rebels but also militias, intervention forces and other armed actors along with the incumbent government and third states (Kasfir et al. 2017). The actors involved in such constellations may cooperate, compete or co-govern with other ANSAs at different moments – as in the case of the militant Islamists groups Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra in northwestern Syria (Schwab 2023) but also with the state, local civilian institutions and international state and transnational non-state actors such as humanitarian organisations. This perspective also allows for an analysis of transnational dynamics, as Nora Stel (2017) offers in the case of the PLO in Lebanon. In Yemen, security is provided by a patchwork of governance actors, ranging from the exiled government and Houthi-captured central state institutions to rebel-held local security institutions and the security forces of foreign interveners (Transfeld et al. 2022).

Beyond co-provided governance, these observations from WANA further question the conceptualisation of the state, not only as a unitary actor but also as an unequivocal order with clear spatial borders and temporal limits. A commitment to a Hobbesian ideal-typical imaginary of order may lead us overlook the processual character of order (‘ordering’), as well as the fuzzy boundaries and existing overlaps between orders (see Worrall 2017, pp. 209, 227).⁶ Again, authors have attempted to capture these phenomena by referring to their hybridity, as Marina Eleftheriadou (2023, p. 135) does for the Yemeni case. According to Volker Boege et al. (2009, p. 17), such a hybrid order is marked by overlapping and competing authority structures, the combination of ‘Western models of governance and elements stemming from local indigenous traditions’ and the lack of a state monopoly on governance, forcing the state to ‘share authority, legitimacy, and capacity with other institutions’. Yet this understanding reiterates the ideas of state-centrism and state-normality criticised above, always conceiving of order relative to the imagined ideal of the Westphalian nation-state – the would-be granter of order.

Other approaches have pursued the deconstruction of the state as a monolithic actor or unified order further and opened up space for both. These make alternative understandings of statehood fruitful for the analysis of armed conflict and they use units of analysis other than ‘actors’ altogether. Joel S. Migdal and Klaus Schlichte (2005, p. 106), for instance, understand statehood as ‘a field of power whose confines are decided upon with means of violence and whose dynamics are marked by the ideal of a coherent, coercive, territorial organization as well as by the practices of social actors’. Similarly, conceptions such as the mediation (Stel 2017, pp. 350–1) or negotiation (Hagmann and Péclard 2010, p. 548) of statehood have emphasised its relational and interactional character rather than simply taking it as an unambiguous ‘order’. By understanding statehood as ‘dynamic process of negotiation and contestation for the accumulation of power and authority by different actors in both peace and wartime’ (Sosnowski 2020, p. 1396), other objects of study and units of analysis enter into view. Marika Sosnowski (2020, pp. 1396, 1405) investigates cease-fires as a social form that encapsulates ‘an embryonic type of wartime order on complex political systems’ or as ‘a locus of statehood negotiation’. Nora Stel (2017) employs the concept of ‘mediated stateness’, using interactions, rather than actors, as her unit of analysis. This allows her to escape a ‘zero-sum-game’ logic by which the Lebanese state has to become ‘weaker’ as the PLO grows ‘stronger’.

The borders of the state, then, are more porous than a simple understanding of state ‘order’ or state ‘actor’ would suggest. Conversely, emerging social orders – or ‘the particular set(s) of institutions that underlie order in a war zone, giving place to distinct patterns of being and relating’ (Arjona 2016, p. 22) – and political orders – or the ‘diverse interactions between states and insurgents that construct political authority and control’ (Staniland 2012, p. 243) – are the result of configurations providing a certain reliability and predictability in relations between rulers and ruled (and among the ruled).

As such, studying ‘order’ means focusing on processes, interactions and unexpected continuities in structures and practices in which actors seem to change as well as shifts in patterns of behaviour in which actors stay the same. This necessarily involves examining relations and networks and, therefore, moving beyond a state- or even actor-centric analysis. It means accounting for the wider orders (temporally and spatially) in which local orders are embedded as well as for the internal order of ‘actors’ (the internal organisation of ‘states’ and ‘non-states’), placing relations, interactions and emerging patterns of behaviours and practices (rather than individual ‘actors’ or ‘actor types’ and their behaviours) at the centre of the examination (see also Worrall 2017, Pfeifer and Schwab 2023).

Conclusion: How to Continue

This article aimed to provide an overview of empirical phenomena that resist the binary state/non-state distinction, systematically taking stock and continuing some of the central debates in the study of armed conflict that have, in large part, taken place in Civil Wars. For many contexts, the distinction may, indeed, be useful for deciphering how conflict dynamics or societies work. However, as we show here, there is reason to believe that the utility of this binary has its limits. It may prove difficult for members of a society as well as those observing and coding a conflict to determine whether they are dealing with either ‘state’ or ‘non-state’ institutions, practices, infrastructure, territory, services etc.

Actors and orders exist that are not reducible to a subtype of the state. They might fit under the category of ‘non-state’ – but only as this category captures everything except the state, thereby making it of little analytical value. Rather, hybrid types, a state-non-state continuum and subtypes that may themselves be placed along continua – and avoid positioning non-state and state at their respective poles – may be more suitable. As a way forward, we suggest establishing multidimensional spaces in which different actors or political communities are placed according to the degree to which they fulfil a given criterion. The dimensions would be determined by the specific research interest and include both ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors. Importantly, such an empirically oriented multi-dimensional approach should also include a longitudinal perspective, as actors might fulfil a different number of criteria at different points in time.

We also demonstrated that the question of whether we are dealing with a ‘state’ or ‘non-state’ actor type is not always a reliable predictor of behaviour, as some warfighting strategies and tactics are employed by both. This raises questions such as: Why do they converge? Is there a logic at work other than the type of actor capable of explaining why some strategies impose themselves rather than others? To answer these, it may be worth moving beyond actors and ‘their’ behaviour as we discussed in the section on order.

As shown by recent contributions addressing the concept of order, a readjustment of the analytical focus may be helpful to make sense of empirical realities: away from analysing dyadic and aggregated state/non-state relations towards networks of all relevant (armed) actors (Staniland 2021, pp. 270–1), interactions and interdependencies between state and non-state actors at different levels (Stel 2017) or observable patterns of action across different actor types (Glawion 2020). This would also uncover structural continuities across what initially appear to be temporal ruptures such as the beginning and end of war (Heydemann 2018) and across spatial boundaries (Buscemi 2023). Studies that use disaggregated dyads, interactions, relations or networks as units of analysis have the potential to uncover phenomena that otherwise escape the scope of investigations based on a binary view of actors. To advance future debates in Civil Wars, we see great potential in approaches that utilise a context-sensitive analysis starting with the local level as an entry point, avoiding methodological localism through comparison of conflict sites and (as we insist) a consideration of the global order (through, e.g., interventions and institutions) and structures (like capitalism and neo-colonialism).

A comparative, disaggregated perspective on relations between ‘the local state’ and ‘local ANSAs’ and their configurations is particularly fruitful. Not only do civilians perceive and experience the state differently in the capital or major cities as compared to rural areas and the countryside, this likely also holds for ANSAs with a greater territorial reach. Some literature has already started to explore this path. Examples include Tim Glawion’s (2020) approach to ordering spaces, actors and practices by locating the interactions of all of the relevant security-providing actors along a spectrum of fluidity/stability; and Alex Waterman’s (2023) work on rebel subversion of state structures in the absence of territorial control.

Although such research is very data-intensive, we believe this is a promising way forward, allowing for a better understanding of local state-non-state interactions, non-state-non-state and non-state-civilian interactions, among others. In order to avoid falling into the subsequent binary of local versus global, it is important to avoid isolating the local level, instead analysing it as a site of global struggles, as well – one in which international hierarchies and transnational social forces manifest through the legacies of colonial rule (Waterman 2023) or military interventions (Glawion 2020). It may be quite an ambitious task exploring local orders as inescapably specific social relations and spaces that are, nonetheless, part of the broader dynamics of armed conflict (calling for comparison with other sites) as well as continuously embedded in and a manifestation of global orders and conflicts (calling for analysis across different scales). Nevertheless, this effort would certainly go a long way in advancing our understanding of civil wars today and in the past.

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).

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.

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’.