The Role of State-Sponsored Militias in Genocide

This article explains how and why armed, non-state actors collaborate with states to inflict massive levels of violence. Regime type and state capacity interact to provide state elites a menu of repertoires for implementing violence, some emphasizing direct state action, others emphasizing cooperation and alliance between state and armed, non-state actors. Rather than struggling in vain to build strong states to eliminate armed non-state actors and establish a monopoly over the use of force, averting genocide might necessitate recruiting and strengthening the power of indigenous, armed non-state actors.     

Terrorism as a strategy of insurgency

This essay describes terrorism as a mode of warfare and examines its unique characteristics, by comparing this method of struggle to other forms of violent conflict. It further emphasizes the role of terrorism as a strategy of insurgence and delineates the main strategic ideas by which terrorists have hoped to achieve their political objectives. The study evaluates terrorists’ success in obtaining political goals and the conditions which affect their ability to materialize their objectives.

The author concludes that the mode of struggle adopted by insurgents is dictated by circumstances rather than by choice, and that whenever possible, insurgents use concurrently a variety of strategies of struggle. Terrorism, which is the easiest form of insurgency, is practically always one of these modes.     

The Usefulness of Examining Terrorists’ Rhetoric for Understanding the Nature of Different Terror Groups

ABSTRACT

This study advances a distinction between two generic types of terrorists’ rhetoric: (1) ideological rhetoric candidly reflecting the terrorists’ genuine beliefs and values regarding their military targeting policy (who is a legitimate target), even when adopting such rhetoric involves high image/diplomatic costs; and (2) a PR-oriented rhetoric which consciously misrepresents the terrorists’ intentions and behavior in an attempt to project a more benign and humane image, thus maintaining sympathy and rebuffing criticism. We contend that such a distinction can provide a highly useful metric for assessing terrorists groups’ rationality and pragmatism: the most pragmatic groups will shift between these two types of rhetoric depending on changing strategic needs. To show the practical usefulness of this distinction we provide criteria for categorizing terrorists’ rhetorical responses to (mostly liberal-minded) criticism that they have killed innocent civilians in their enemy’s camp. We apply our criteria by examining terrorists’ (sincere and insincere) apologies.     

The devil's in the theory: A critical assessment of Robert Chambers' work on participatory development

The practice orientation of Robert Chambers' work on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), which aims at enabling local people and communities to take control over their own development, has received much attention in development circles. This article attempts to shift the emphasis away from PRA's practice towards its theoretical underpinnings. The article argues that PRA's practice/empiricist orientation causes it to be insufficiently theorised and politicised. As a result, questions about inclusiveness, the role of PRA facilitators, and the personal behaviour of elites overshadow, or sometimes ignore, questions of legitimacy, justice, power and the politics of gender and difference. The article draws on arguments and debates involving Habermasian 'deliberative democracy' and post-structuralist notions of power.     

Democratising,internationalising, and globalising: A collage of blurred images

This article emphasises the relevance and importance of Gayatri Spivak's work for those of us involved in the field of development (as academics, researchers or development workers). Spivak underlines how our representations, especially of marginalised Third World groups, are intimately linked to our positioning (socioeconomic, gendered, cultural, geographic, historical, institutional). She therefore demands a heightened self‐reflexivity that mainstream development analysts (eg Robert Chambers), and even ‘critical’ ones (eg Escobar, Shiva), have failed to live up to. The article examines Spivak's writings to illustrate the reasons, advantages and limits of this hyper‐self‐reflexivity.     

Participatory development,complicity and desire

Abstract

This article is an attempt at rethinking participatory development (pd) in terms of empire, undertaking a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading. Postcolonialism helps point out that our discursive constructions of the Third World say more about us than the Third World; while psychoanalysis helps uncover the desires we invest in the Other. Thus, to the question, ‘why do neo-imperial and inegalitarian relationships pervade pd?’, the article answers, ‘because even as pd promotes the Other's empowerment, it hinges crucially on our complicity and desire’; and ‘because disavowing such complicity and desire is a technology of power’. The argument, in other words, is that complicity and desire are written into pd, making it prone to an exclusionary, Western-centric and inegalitarian politics. The article concludes with possibilities for confronting our complicities and desires through pd's radicalisation.