Armed Group Agency during Civil Wars

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Contemporary civil wars involve a wide array of international and transnational actors. At the same time, the structure of international politics appears to be shifting significantly. How are shifts in the global order affecting patterns of outside support to armed groups in civil wars and the narratives around them? And how are armed groups themselves exercising their own agency over these shifts, adapting their strategies to new international circumstances and indeed creating some of these circumstances themselves?

This is the second of two panels that explores these themes. The presentations are chapters of a collective project led by Theodore McLauchlin and Marie-Joëlle Zahar analyzing analyzing how changes to international politics are shaping external and local action in civil wars. The project brings together macro analyses of contemporary changes to patterns of external intervention by states and the UN (on the one hand) and case studies that analyze the strategies of local actors as they face these changes. Much existing scholarship and public commentary in this field focuses on a single global change or narrative, such as the return of great power competition. Typically this kind of work uses a top-down analytical approach, analyzing how global changes shape local conflicts, with the agency of local actors treated above all in terms of how local agents deviate from what outside principals want. In contrast, we argue for a multiplicity of trends and narratives and for a renewed emphasis on local actors as significant, autonomous actors in the changing international politics of civil wars.

As a whole, the project finds that there are multiple overlapping and intersecting trends and narratives, including great-power competition, conflicts over transnational jihadism and the War on Terror, and a wide array of regional alignments and narratives. In this context, the volume collectively argues for understanding the international politics of civil wars in terms of co-production of alignments and narratives by local and international actors. Armed groups exercise significant agency at the interstices of different international changes, and are able to forward their own conflict narratives.

This second panel recruits specialists with in-depth knowledge of conflicts for papers that focus on how armed groups navigate international changes. Geographically, the panel covers not only the Middle East cases that dominate much public discussion about proxy wars, but also conflicts in Latin America and East Asia, permitting analysis of points of similarity and difference in different geopolitical settings. In different ways, the papers all work at the intersection between rationalist analyses of principal-agent relationships and constructivist emphasis on narratives in external support. Pelletier and Lord examine how the United Wa State Army in Myanmar navigated the dilemma of maintaining Chinese support and their own autonomy in a context in which China is viewed with some suspicion. Alvarez-Vanegas and Shesterinina place emphasis on a two-way support relationship between the FARC-EP and Venezuela, a relationship in which the FARC-EP played an important international narrative role in helping to constitute the South American “Bolivarian” alignment. On the Libyan civil war, Badi explores Khalifa Haftar's use of different narratives to appeal to different external and internal supporters and bridge international and local support. In his Sudan case study, Medani emphasizes warring parties' agency in negotiating and navigating shifting regional alignments and narratives. Finally, Szekely maps the multilayered conflict axes of the Syrian civil war, using the importance of different conflict axes and local parties' use of social media tools as key variables to analyze the ability of armed groups to maintain autonomy from their sponsors.
This is a distinguished group of authors, well balanced as to gender, academic rank, and geographic origin. Taken as a whole, their papers all demonstrate the usefulness of analyzing alignments and narratives in internationalized civil wars as a co-production of local and outside actors, with international changes opening new opportunities for armed groups.

We have recruited a highly qualified senior-junior team of discussants: Paul Staniland, whose scholarship on armed group strategies in the face of international politics is well known, and Alexandra Chinchilla, who has extensive expertise and publication experience on patron-client relationships in proxy wars.

Sub Unit

• Division 19: International Security 

Individual Presentations

• Beyond Proxies? China-UWSA Relations and Agency in Myanmar Civil War - Alexandre Pelletier, Université Laval; Alexandre Lord

• Moulding the Libyan Arab Armed Forces as a Praetorian Guard - Emadeddin Badi

• Sudan’s War and the New Regional Order in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East - Khalid Medani, McGill University

• Two-Way Support: Venezuela and the FARC-EP in Regional Perspective - Eduardo Álvarez-Vanegas, The University of York; Anastasia Shesterinina, University of York

• Dynamics of Intervention in the Syrian Civil War - Ora B. Szekely, Clark University

Chair

• Theodore D. McLauchlin Université de Montréal

Discussants

• Paul Staniland University of Chicago

• Alexandra Chinchilla Texas A&M, Bush School of Govt and Public Service