Research on militias portrays them as subservient proxies of governments used to achieve
tactical goals. The conventional wisdom, however, ignores the diversity of state–militia …

Militias are an empirical phenomenon that has been overlooked by current research on civil
war. Yet, it is a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding political violence, civil war, post …

From Syria to Sudan, governments have informal ties with militias that use violence against
opposition groups and civilians. Building on research that suggests these groups offer …

This forum provides an outlet for an assessment of research on the delegation of war to non-
state armed groups in civil wars. Given the significant growth of studies concerned with this …

Anti-insurgent militias and states attempt to erode insurgent groups' capacities and co-opt
insurgent fighters by promising and providing benefits. They do so to create a perception …

Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or excessively
brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed conflicts from 1989 to …

This article seeks to explain why some high-capacity democracies have high levels of
internal violence. These regimes present a puzzle: Why are bureaucratically capable states …

This article presents a typology of armed non-state actors in hybrid warfare: proxy, auxiliary,
surrogate and affiliated forces. By focusing on the kinetic domain of hybrid warfare, the …

Proxy wars are still under-represented in conflict research and a key cause for this is the lack
of conceptual and terminological care. This article seeks to demonstrate that minimising …

Governments often supplement the regular military with paramilitaries and progovernment
militias (PGMs). However, it is unclear what determines states' selection of these auxiliary …