Armed groups, organized violence and the Euro-Mediterranean spaces (1870-1914)

Within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War” (http://www.prewaras.eu - PI prof. Matteo Millan), the Università degli Studi di Padova – Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World – and the École Française de Rome (EFR) will be holding an international workshop in Rome (EFR) on 23 January 2019. This scientific event aims to create an original dialogue, both comparative and transnational, around a topic that is relatively new for the period 1870-1914, namely armed groups. This subject will be considered in relation to political violence and with a relatively flexible geography: Euro-Mediterranean spaces, understood in a broad sense. By focusing on armed groups and their forms of legitimization, action and organization, the study of political violence can empirically deepen our knowledge of the so-called “State monopoly of legitimate violence”. Armed groups and their forms of legitimacy were not unrelated to the power of the State, even though these groups were not integrated into national armies (at least, not directly). The main question to be addressed is the relationship between armed groups and the legitimate use of violence, by analyzing similarities, differences, transfers and their influences on the social world at large (associations, coteries, clans, the nation, etc.), throughout the Euro-Mediterranean region between 1870 and 1914.

European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire, 2020

The article explores the intersection between paramilitary mobilization and nation-building in the area of Thesprotia in northwestern Greece. It does so by examining the activities of the right-wing paramilitaries of EDES (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Sindesmos-National Republican Greek League) between the Axis occupation and the early Cold War period. Studies of nation-building in twentieth-century Europe have adopted a state-centric approach. More recent scholarship has questioned this approach and presented a more nuanced picture of the nation-making process. A significant strand of this scholarship discusses the role of non-state armed actors-bandits, paramilitaries and criminal gangs-in this process. The present article contributes to this literature by focusing on an aspect of paramilitarism that has largely been overlooked in the existing scholarship: governance. The article discusses patterns of paramilitary governance and explores the impact of wartime rule in local institutions and civilian security, as well as the political legacies of paramilitarism.

Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Volume 43, Issue 2, 2019

The historiography of the Greek civil war has made significant progress during the past decade, but the origins, role and activities of paramilitaries remain under-researched. Most studies have focused on the period of the 'white terror' and explored the collusion between the state and the paramilitary groups. Although such studies have advanced our understanding of this turbulent period, they have not discussed important issues such as the motivation of the rank and file members, the sociopolitical networks used to recruit and mobilize support and the diverse conditions under which militias emerge. The article will address this lacuna and provide new insights into the origins, development and legacies of paramilitarism.

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol.39 Issue 3, 2019

The paper considers the rise of the violent nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire and questions the violent basis of these nationalisms. In the first place, the paper points out Western Europe as the source of modern nationalism and emphasizes its initial appearance as a result of a long-lasting dynamics of conflicts and reconciliations amongst social, political and economic groups in Europe. In many other parts of the world, modern nationalism appeared as part of Europeanization and modernization usually carried out by a certain west European educated elite. In most of those places, modern nationalism was quite alien to the social, political, and economic structures and practices. However, as the particular case under scrutiny here demonstrates, modern nationalism gained ground in non-western world by the widespread authoritarian and often-violent pressures applied upon the people by violent paramilitary and/or guerilla groups formed and led by the Western-oriented elite. This peculiar emergence of modern nationalism would certainly create problems in the long run in terms of constructing a well-structured nation-state and a widely shared national consensus. The paper’s main focus is the insurgent nationalist movements in the Balkans and the Ottoman counter-insurgency, which developed a similar mindset in their struggle against each other, which would contribute to the problematic emergence of nation-states and the continuous unrest in the region.

2016

Contemporary European History, 2010

In this comparative conclusion, the authors consider some of the most influential trends in the historiography of political and paramilitary violence, with particular reference to the relationship between wartime and post-war violence. The heuristic value of the ‘aftershocks’ metaphor is considered, as are the advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the contributors’ transnational approach. Finally, the authors suggest an agenda for future research on paramilitary violence, which looks at the phenomenon in a global perspective.

2017

This paper argues in favor of a theory and classification of armed groups that setsthem at the center of political and social sciences. Starting from the problem of order, itargues that without armed groups one cannot understand how stable societies form,function and reproduce themselves. It challenges the preeminence of concepts such as class and gender, which are seen as depicting later-formed social structures. It proposes a classification of armed groups based on their permanent or impermanent character, as well as the reasons for using violence, mostly extractive and ideological. The article also discusses armed groups operating within the state.

Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2021

The article explores the intersection between paramilitarism, organized crime, and nation-building during the Greek Civil War. Nation-building has been described in terms of a centralized state extending its writ through a process of modernisation of institutions and monopolisation of violence. Accordingly, the presence and contribution of private actors has been a sign of and a contributive factor to state-weakness. This article demonstrates a more nuanced image wherein nation-building was characterised by pervasive accommodations between, and interlacing of, state and non-state violence. This approach problematises divisions between legal (state-sanctioned) and illegal (private) violence in the making of the modern nation state and sheds new light into the complex way in which the 'men of the gun' interacted with the 'men of the state' in this process, and how these alliances impacted the nation-building process at the local and national levels.