Militias in internal warfare: From the colonial era to the contemporary Middle East

Although it is a tenet of political science that the modern state possesses a ‘monopoly of violence’, governments have repeatedly used militias outside the formal chain of command of their armed forces when waging counterinsurgency (COIN), and in recent conflicts the USA, UK, and other Western powers have used irregular forces when fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. War-weariness and financial austerity is likely to encourage American and allied policymakers to rely on auxiliaries as proxies, despite the fact that historical experience demonstrates that the use of militias in COIN can have counterproductive consequences, not least for state stability. This article also concludes that the tendency of some Middle Eastern states (notably Iraq and Syria) to ‘coup-proof’ their militaries renders them even more dependent on militias in the face of a sustained internal revolt, as their regular armed forces collapse under the stress of combat. In this respect, there is a direct link between ‘coup-proofing’, dependence on irregular auxiliaries in civil war, and the erosion of the state’s integrity.