This new book provides a framework for understanding the international relations of armed groups, including terrorist organizations, insurgencies and warlords, which play an increasingly important role in the international system. Specifically, the book argues that such groups can be understood as taking part in the balance of power with states and other armed groups, as they are empirically sovereign non-state actors that are motivated by the pursuit of power and exist as part of an anarchic, self-help system. This radically new approach offers a renewed conceptualization of Neorealism, and provides new insights into debates about sovereignty, non-state actors, new wars, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency. The approach is illustrated through case studies on Somali warlords, the security complex between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), Sudan and Uganda, as well as Al Qaeda. The book provides insights into such issues as how non-state actors can be integrated into structural theories of international relations, and also offers pragmatic methodologies for the foreign policy or military practitioner, such as how to best deter terrorists.

In Ordering Violence, Paul Staniland advances a broad approach to armed politics—bringing together governments, insurgents, militias, and armed political parties in a shared framework—to argue that governments' perception of the ideological threats posed by armed groups drive their responses and interactions. Staniland combines a unique new dataset of state-group armed orders in India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka with detailed case studies from the region to explore when and how this model of threat perception provides insight into patterns of repression, collusion, and mutual neglect across nearly seven decades. Instead of straightforwardly responding to the material or organizational power of armed groups, Staniland finds, regimes assess how a group's politics align with their own ideological projects. Explaining, for example, why governments often use extreme repression against weak groups even while working with or tolerating more powerful armed actors, Ordering Violence provides a comprehensive overview of South Asia's complex armed politics, embedded within an analytical framework that can also speak broadly beyond the subcontinent.

First edition published in 2003.

This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations, yet it has never been comprehensively examined in pre-modern or non-European contexts. This book redresses this imbalance. The authors present eight new case studies of balancing and balancing failure in pre-modern and non-European international systems.

The Diffusion of Military Power examines how the financial and organizational challenges of adopting new methods of fighting wars can influence the international balance of power. Michael Horowitz argues that a state or actor wishing to adopt a military innovation must possess both the financial resources to buy or build the technology and the internal organizational capacity to accommodate any necessary changes in recruiting, training, or operations. How countries react to new innovations--and to other actors that do or don't adopt them--has profound implications for the global order and the likelihood of war. Horowitz looks at some of the most important military innovations throughout history, including the advent of the all-big-gun steel battleship, the development of aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, and the use of suicide terror by nonstate actors. He shows how expensive innovations can favor wealthier, more powerful countries, but also how those same states often stumble when facing organizationally complicated innovations. Innovations requiring major upheavals in doctrine and organization can disadvantage the wealthiest states due to their bureaucratic inflexibility and weight the balance of power toward smaller and more nimble actors, making conflict more likely. This book provides vital insights into military innovations and their impact on U.S. foreign policy, warfare, and the distribution of power in the international system.

This is a book on conflict and consensus aimed at the general reader. In active, plain and direct language it makes the seemingly abstract and complex issues simple. Its view of peace is well-rounded, tough-minded, one that well understands the difficult world of social and personal violence and conflict. At its heart is a simple finding: "to wage peace we need to foster freedom." The human race can best achieve that simple aim by "leaving people alone to form their own communities." "The Conflict Helix "avoids the ambiguous in favor of the categorical; the hedged, qualified statement for the direct Rummel presents a series of basic principles, each concerning an aspect of conflict and peace - psychological, interpersonal, societal, international - and each aspect having its own master principle. These principles are not mere organizational props, but are deeply theoretical and empirically fundamental. The volume expresses the core ideas, results and conclusions of Rummel's major, five-volume work on "Understanding Conflict and War. "In discarding technical material and focusing on principles and meaning, "The Conflict Helix "presents an executive summary of a lifetime of work in a digestible form. In light of recent events in Europe, Asia and Latin American this work takes on a special poignancy for the developing no less than the industrialized worlds. Hence, this book should be of value to the general reader as well as professionals and advanced students of international politics.

Some of the most brutal and long-lasting civil wars of our time involve the rapid formation and disintegration of alliances among warring groups, as well as fractionalization within them. It would be natural to suppose that warring groups form alliances based on shared identity considerations - such as Christian groups allying with Christian groups - but this is not what we see. Two groups that identify themselves as bitter foes one day, on the basis of some identity narrative, might be allies the next day and vice versa. Nor is any group, however homogeneous, safe from internal fractionalization. Rather, looking closely at the civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia and testing against the broader universe of fifty-three cases of multiparty civil wars, Fotini Christia finds that the relative power distribution between and within various warring groups is the primary driving force behind alliance formation, alliance changes, group splits and internal group takeovers.