Explore the vast range of titles available.

Our study examines whether citizens punish political misbehavior by estimating the impact of disciplinary sanctions on the re-election of political parties in Colombian mayoral elections. Results reveal that disciplinary sanctions have no effect on the re-election of paramilitary-linked parties. However, they can have a significant negative impact on the re-election of traditional and minority parties. The lack of punishment suggests that organizations manipulate voters through persuasion mechanisms, aligned with the Schumpeterian view of political competition.

This article examines the attack on a mosque in Samalanga, Aceh, Indonesia, by showing the relations between religious ideology, the state, and paramilitary groups. Intolerance studies in the Muslim world pay less attention to the ideology in the sectarian state, and its influence on attacking houses of worship. Using the state-parallel theory to look at the case of the attack on the Muhammadiyah Mosque in Samalanga, Aceh, this article argues that attacking the house of worship cannot be separated from state ideology. Based on the case study, data are collected by interviewing actors, such as the Aswaja group, staff government in Sangso, and Muhammadiyah members in Sangso. In the end, the article concluded that intolerance in the Muslim world can be seen from the parallel relation between religious ideology, state, and religious paramilitary.

The columnist Jamelle Bouie argues that the Trump administration’s immigration policy has more in common with ethnic cleansing than actual immigration enforcement.

Despite efforts employed by the Colombian state to demobilize paramilitary groups and to tackle organized crime structures since 2003, Colombia today remains characterized by a repressive apparatus of social control by paramilitary successor groups in certain sectors of the population. Drawing on information from Colombia’s second-largest city – Medellín – and various rural areas of the Department of Antioquia, this work offers a characterization of the legacies of the paramilitary phenomenon, and its continuities and transformations in relation to one particular paramilitary confederation, theAutodefensas Unidas de Colombia(AUC). In many regions, the AUC gained territorial, economic, and social control by managing the illegal drug economy and perpetrating political violence against leftist parties and social organizations. Paramilitaries have thus exerted what we refer to asstatus quo-oriented violence. As we illustrate for the case of Medellín, mechanisms of territorial, economic, and social control, as well as the particular manifestations of violence related to these mechanisms, have been transferred to paramilitary successor groups. The findings are mainly based on the outcomes of qualitative field research carried out in Medellín in mid-2015.

State interventions against organized criminal groups (OCGs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this article offers a theory about criminal governance in five types of criminal regimes—Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Split. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors, abuse or cooperate with the community, and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival OCGs. Police interventions in these criminal regimes pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. We provide evidence of this theory by using a multimethod research design combining quasi-experimental statistical analyses, automated text analysis, extensive qualitative research, and a large-N survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the favelas from criminal organizations.

Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of \"fratricidal flipping\" that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping mechanism against competing theories in the cases of Kashmir and Sri Lanka. These wars involve within-conflict variation in defection across groups and over time. A detailed study of the empirical record, including significant fieldwork, suggests that fratricide was the dominant trigger for defection, while government policy played a secondary role in facilitating pro-state paramilitarism. Deep ideological disagreements were surprisingly unimportant in driving defection. The argument is probed in other wars in Asia. The complex internal politics of insurgent movements deserve careful attention.

There have been reported cases of operational stress experienced by security and paramilitary officers in Nigeria ranging from high to moderate on a continuum of duty posts.  Many officers tend to experience operational stress that affects their psychological well-being and productivity. Thus, a study on the influence of operational stress and coping strategies on psychological well -being among paramilitary officers in Bade LGA., Yobe State. The study objectives were: to examine independent influence of operational stress and coping strategies on the psychological well-being of paramilitary officers in Bade, LGA; investigate the joint influence of operational stress and coping strategies on the psychological well-being of paramilitary officers in Bade, LGA. A total of 220 participants, comprising Police (60), Civil Defense (50), Correctional Service (45), and Federal Road Safety Corps (65) were used with purposive sampling techniques. Three standardized instruments namely: Operational Stress; Psychological well-being, and Coping Strategies Scales, were used.   Simple linear and multiple regression analyses were performed.  The findings revealed that operational stress and coping strategies independently and jointly predicted psychological well-being among paramilitary officers in Bade LGA [F (1,218) =43.956; P<.01; F(1,218) = 51.423; P<.01]; [F (2,137) = 47.153; P<.01] . The study recommended, among others, that the Federal Government of Nigeria should increase the number of paramilitary formations and personnel in Northeast Nigeria with a view to reducing workloads for efficiency and psychological well-being.  Additionally, resilience training for coping strategies should be provided by the Federal Government of Nigeria to improve psychological well-being. 

Many states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia lack the monopoly of violence, even though this was identified by Max Weber as the foundation of the state, and thus the capacity to govern effectively. In this paper we develop a new perspective on the establishment of the monopoly of violence. We build a model to explain the incentive of central states to eliminate nonstate armed actors (paramilitaries) in a democracy. The model is premised on the idea that paramilitaries may choose to and can influence elections. Since paramilitaries have preferences over policies, this reduces the incentives of the politicians they favor to eliminate them. We then investigate these ideas using data from Colombia between 1991 and 2006. We first present regression and case study evidence supporting our postulate that paramilitary groups can have significant effects on elections for the legislature and the executive. Next, we show that the evidence is also broadly consistent with the implication of the model that paramilitaries tend to persist to the extent that they deliver votes to candidates for the executive whose preferences are close to theirs and that this effect is larger in areas where the presidential candidate would have otherwise not done as well. Finally, we use roll-call votes to illustrate a possible \"quid pro quo\" between the executive and paramilitaries in Colombia.

Organized crime has emerged as the most important security threat to democratic governance in Latin America. This essay explains why Latin American democracies have been able to curb other security threats (from the military, insurgents, and oligopolists) but are struggling to contain organized crime. Organized crime possesses power assets associated with traditional security threats (military capacity, territorial control, and access to markets). But it also operates innovatively: It infiltrates and coopts the state, which makes it difficult for presidents to rely on state institutions (such as the police, the army, the courts, and prisons) to act in a unified way to fight organized crime. To date, there are no successful cases of Latin American states truly defeating organized crime. But states have means of rendering organized crime less predatory and violent.

This article provides an investigation into claims that paramilitary violence in Colombia can pose a threat to the peace agreement signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels. These claims highlight the capacity for paramilitary groups to ‘spoil’ the peace deal. Hitherto, however, there is a lack of scholarly research to investigate the potential of paramilitary spoiling. Firstly, this article highlights the flaws in the government’s perspective that paramilitarism no longer exists in Colombia. Instead, the government argues that Colombia is plagued by criminal bands (known as BACRIMs). Secondly, through fieldwork interviews and questionnaires conducted in FARC demobilisation camps, together with descriptive data analysed through a uniquely coded dataset on violence in western Colombia, this article supports claims that successor paramilitary groups represent a key spoiler threat to the current government-FARC peace process. On the one hand, the paramilitaries can represent a direct spoiler threat by, for instance, violently targeting demobilising FARC guerrillas. On the other hand, successor paramilitary groups represent a key indirect spoiler threat, as paramilitary violence is exacerbating the root causes of the conflict that the peace deal seeks to address, with negative implications for the prospects for peace.