Militias

En este capítulo de libro abordo el papel de los milicianos de origen ne- groafricano en la defensa de ciudades, pueblos y puertos hispanoame- ricanos, para después relacionarlo con una comedia poco conocida del Siglo de Oro, titulada "El valiente negro en Flandes", de Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy, cuyo protagonista es un esclavo que lucha en los Tercios de Flandes. Se trata de un argumento dramático de gran actualidad, pues desafía los tópicos racistas, planteando la igualdad entre las personas.

This article presents version 2.0 of the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). It is increasingly clear that it is untenable to assume a unified security sector, as states often rely on militias to carry out security tasks. The PGMD 2.0 provides new opportunities for studying questions such as when states rely on militias, how they chose among different types and the consequences for stability and peace. We detail how the PGMD 2.0 provides new information on the characteristics, behaviour, life cycle and organization of 504 pro-government militias across the globe between 1981 and 2014.

This article examines the racial dynamics and performative nature of US gun culture by analyzing the 2014 standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management. The standoff followed discernible scripts of white masculine privilege and drew on scenarios of conquest in the US American West, as Bundy's supporters gathered at his ranch and brandished their weapons in open defiance of the federal government. The act of brandishing their guns was a 'performance of belonging', a public, theatrical gesture that marks the bearer as a full participant in civic life and all its attendant rights and privileges. This belonging, however, is predicated on histories of white supremacist laws and settler colonialist violence. By reading gun culture in the United States through the lens of performance, this article traces the profound discrepancies between legal and practical gun rights and illuminates one of the most intractable debates at the center of US American life. Keywords American West • Cliven Bundy • gun culture • guns • militias • performance • race • theatricality journal of visual culture Brandishing Guns: Performing Race and Belonging in the American West Lindsay Livingston Perched on an overpass in the southwestern desert, civilian snipers took aim at the crowd of people below. In the days leading up to this moment, the gunmen had arrived from all over the United States, answering a call that had gone out in early April 2014 from several right-wing websites and

These five articles were written by late 2009.  They were my first analysis linking William S. Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare strategy to John Tanton’s anti-immigration movement; the anti-immigration movement to the white nationalist or white supremacist movement; showing how the Christian Right took over the primary vehicle of the anti-immigration movement, namely, the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps; and, showing that William S. Lind’s role, beyond developing the Fourth Generation Warfare strategy, has during the time period of this initial study (2005-2009) written strategic assessments in the form of brief articles that, when combined with Thomas Chittum’s book, Civil War II: The Coming Breakup of America, give insight into how the Patriot militia movement may have perceived the strategic situation.  As my first analytical attempt, no doubt there are errors of judgement.  But, this analysis drove me to understand the Christian Right—thus the first book that will be published here is on the Christian Right—and the Patriot militia.  The latter is the topic of the second book, of which several draft chapters have already been posted to academia.edu.  The third book covers the Tea Party movement.

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RESUMEN:
Así fue pasando el tiempo, memorias de una miliciana extremeña es el relato de vida de María de la Luz Mejías Correa, recogido y prologado por su nieto, Manuel Pulido Mendoza. Como el relato de la vida de tantas otras personas de la generación de María, el texto se configura como una fuente historiográfica de la historia oral. El testimonio de María de la Luz es especialmente significativo, porque ilustra el cambio cultural producido en las clases de extracción rural en Extremadura durante el siglo XX. Refleja, del mismo modo, la evolución del papel social desempeñado por la mujer de estas clases en la sociedad contemporánea extremeña; ilustra los usos y costumbres de la época de nuestros abuelos, a la vez que muestra cómo la militancia política, la guerra y la dictadura afectaron a la cotidianeidad de sus vidas. El testimonio de María es doblemente relevante por su implicación activa y directa como miembro de la milicia de las Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas de Extremadura. Esta edición cuenta con prólogo de Manuel Pulido Mendoza (Badajoz, 1977) ha sido becario predoctoral de la Junta de Extremadura en la UEX, del Ayto. de Madrid en la Residencia de Estudiantes (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas) y del Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico Español (Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid). Actualmente da los últimos retoques a su tesis doctoral La biografía moderna en España (1926-1936) y es autor de varios estudios relacionados con la prosa española de entreguerras.

In 2004, an unlikely combination of rural insurgent groups and urban gangs fought over the fate of President Aristide and brought Haiti to the brink of civil war. Ten years on, the country is still plagued by instances of armed violence. While most policy experts and practitioners seem to agree that over the last decade, violence transformed from a political into a criminal phenomenon, scholars remain divided over the question of whether Haiti's urban armed groups should be framed as a political movement or as hardened criminals. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and overt observation conducted during six months of fieldwork in Haiti in 2013, this article argues that it is crucial to refocus the analysis on the functions gangs fulfil on behalf of their politico-criminal sponsors. In contrast to the proclaimed internal shift from political to criminal motivation, this approach suggests that the constantly changing priorities of political entrepreneurs and organised crime groups shape the nature of the violent service offered by urban armed groups. The findings of this article mirror comparable dynamics in other countries in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa and have crucial implications for international agencies working in the urban environment and dealing with urban armed groups.

This book presents rural residents of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, with an accessible history of the brutal armed conflict they experienced as massacre survivors, guerrilla supporters, army militia members, combatants and refugees. Financed by the Ford Foundation. Guatemala: CEDFOG (2003, 170 pp., second edition 2010, 170 pp.).

PhD Thesis examining the role of the Irish Executive and other branches of British state and military power in responding to the Fenian Rising in 1867. Includes chapters that examine: the Suspension of Habeas Corpus, the Irish Constabulary, the British Army and Militia, and the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and Coast Guard.

After nearly a hundred years of debate and analysis, the gang concept remains hotly contested within the social sciences. Once thought to be an exclusively American phenomenon, the study of gangs has become increasingly global over the last several decades. Countries from every world region have observed the emergence of gangs and gang-like groups. In some of these places, gangs resemble their American counterparts while in others they not only engage in  petty crime and drug trafficking but targeted assassinations, corruption of public officials, and racketeering as well. These activities make them less like the delinquent youth groups they were once conceived as and more akin to organized crime. In less stable and violent contexts still, gangs have even been incorporated into ethnic militias, rebel groups, and paramilitaries or have taken on a more vigilante ethos by combating violence and providing some semblance of order. The remarkable proliferation of the gang form over the last several decades and the incredible variation in the phenomenon across the globe requires a reassessment of the gang concept.
In the limited literature which focuses on the study of gangs cross-nationally, there have been several conceptualizations proposed. Some scholars have attempted to separate smaller street gangs from a variety of other related phenomena: prison gangs, drug gangs, and organized crime. They have done so by crafting a more restrictive concept. However, while separating street gangs from other criminal groups may make sense in the American or European context, it applies less well to other parts of the globe where such organizational forms have become thoroughly integrated thus blurring these traditional conceptual boundaries. On the other hand, some scholars have advocated for a conceptual framework which captures the transformative nature of gangs and encompasses any and all types of gangs and gang-like groups. Such an evolutionary framework fails, however, to distinguish between gangs and a huge variety of criminal and political non-state armed groups which share little in terms of their origins, motivations, or activities. The best conceptualization, this author argues, is a minimal one that incorporates gangs and many gang-like groups but avoids conceptual stretching to include virtually all non-state armed groups. Ultimately, contemporary scholars of gangs within any national context must be increasingly attentive to the global dimensions of the gang organizational form and the various overlapping and multi-faceted relationships they maintain with a variety of other  non-state armed groups.

When I began researching and writing on the American right-wing, I was heavily influenced by my experiences as a senior intelligence analyst covering the Serbian and Croatian wars of aggression against Bosnia & Herzegovina.  I believed that the elites using the mass media were priming their populations for genocide--something I called an ethnic cleansing pre-disposition.  For the American right-wing, I divided the soft versus hard ethnic cleansing pre-disposition.  The soft versus hard came from the SPLC's differentiation of hard anti-immigrant groups from white supremacists.  Or something like that.

The Syrian economy did well in several macro-economic indices in the past decade, but suffered from growing corruption, social exclusion and the rise of a corrupt oligarchy. A lack of political liberalization and accountability contributed to the Syrian uprising, which has been followed by a dramatic decline in the country’s economy as violence has intensified. Syria’s fragmentation has also given rise to warlordism and local economies based on theft and smuggling.

Durante casi tres siglos la defensa del imperio español quedó en manos de militares sacados de la población civil. En el caso de Chile, se puede ver claramente como en el siglo XVI cada encomendero tuvo que proveer soldados para la defensa del reino y en muchos casos, ellos mismos viajaron año tras año con los gobernadores en sus labores militares. Con el paso de los años, los encomenderos de Santiago lograron una victoria judicial que les permitió mantener sus deberes militares dentro de la jurisdicción de la ciudad donde estaban avecindados, sin tener que ir a defender las ciudades del sur.

Disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programmes form part of standard post-conflict peacebuilding tools regularly applied in the context of UN peacekeeping operations. Yet, the limitations of such templates become evident when peacebuilders are confronted with unconventional settings, such as the urban environment. So far, there is a scarcity of research on UN-led DDR efforts in cities, even though the proliferation of urban armed groups is projected to pose an intractable challenge for decades to come. Based on six months of fieldwork in Port-au-Prince, this article presents new empirical evidence on innovative DDR programming in Haiti, the only country where a United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) tried to implement a traditional DDR programme for gang members. As this attempt proved to be a failure, the mission subsequently changed its approach to a more community-focused armed violence reduction and prevention programme which aims to disincentivize at-risk sections of the population from joining gangs. Even though the current community violence reduction approach is better adapted to the unconventional conflict environment in Haiti and is seen by many practitioners today as a role model, it shares a number of limitations with traditional DDR programmes and is not a panacea for urban peacebuilding.

I would submit that this chapter lends added weight to Clarkson’s original insight and observation.  In the seventeen years since Clarkson first wrote his book, the Christian Right has developed a Fourth Generation Warfare strategy and related strategies, operational plans, propaganda campaigns, multi-billion dollars of information infrastructure, and myriad networks to win their war against a secular American democracy that appears to consider the “culture wars” over, neglects to examine the Christian Right’s strategy, overlooks its organization building and networking, and the cross-linking of right-wing movement segments through the spread of narrative structures.  The Ron Paul-linked Oath Keepers and Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the National Precinct Alliance, and his homeschooling curriculum are all part of this war.

Most reports about the state of Christians in Syria and Iraq centre on their persecution and dwindling numbers. In the rare cases that Christians are granted political agency, they are –simplistically– placed in the pro-Assad camp. Even then, they are relegated to a passive role, abstaining from violence. However, in reality, the Christian communities in Syria and Iraq have assumed a military role, for the first time in the region after decades. In this context, militias fighting on opposite camps, geographical pressures and concerns, competing identities and alliances and even foreign fighters form a complex mosaic of Christian forces that have moved beyond the neutrality threshold.

This chapter presents the “hole-in-the-donut,” that is, the actual plan that the Christian Right had for the development of the Patriot militia in the 1990s.  Chapters 14, 15, and 16 established the operational links and the ideological affinities between the Christian Right, the National Rifle Association and other gun rights absolutist organizations, the Wise Use/County Rule movements, and the Patriot militias.  Of course, the Christian Reconstructionists did not necessarily hide their intentions to create a Patriot militia movement, but then again, they did not necessarily broadcast clearly those intentions.

The article discusses the origins of the idea to deploy a territorial defense in Ukraine. The author relies on his own experience of participating in working groups that were created in 2014 at the direction of the National Security and Defense Council.

This book examines John Calvin’s sense of vocation.

1) It begins with an analysis of thinking on prophecy in early, medieval, and Reformation theology.

2) It finds Calvin within a non-mystical, non-apocalyptic prophetic tradition that focused on scriptural interpretation.

3) It argues Calvin believed his prophetic authority was the same as Isaiah and Jeremiah, and suggests that he may have held himself to be infallible in matters related to Christian doctrine.

4) It argues that starting from about 1555, Calvin began to conceive the idea of encouraging one of the French 'lesser magistrates' (the princes of the blood royal) to rise up in armed conflict against the sitting French king with the aim of taking the throne.

5) Thus, it argues that when that did happen in 1562 when Louis of Condé gathered troops in Orléans and declared their intentions to liberate King Charles IX from the evil councillors surrounding him, this had Calvin's fingerprints on it -- Calvin was to a significant degree responsible for this turn of events.

6) Calvin pursued this plan, I argue, as one of a number of approaches to winning France for the gospel. In this way, the volume explores Calvin's sense of vocation and the impact this had on his political thought.

After conquering large swaths of Syria and Iraq, the IS undertook an aggressive sectarian campaign in which they not only enacted horrific violence against the Shia people, but also damaged or destroyed several key Shia mosques and shrines. Drawing on Social Movement Theory (SMT), this article analyzes the response by various Shia nonstate actors—militia leaders, religious clergymen, populist preachers, and seminal poets. It argues that they used the IS threat to Shia holy sites to develop and deploy a mobilization frame that has come to be referred to as the “shrine protection narrative.” The article also documents the manifold consequences of the shrine protection narrative: it underpinned a mass recruitment drive that saw tens of thousands enlist; it legitimized foreign Shia militias to enter the conflicts in both Syria and Iraq; it justified the formation of entirely new militias who declared the centrality of shrine protection to their mandate; and it mobilized them to enact political violence. In doing so, this article extends existing studies of SMT to demonstrate that “sacred spaces”—and particularly the need to protect religious sites from specific threats—can serve as a powerful mobilization frame towards political violence.

The strategies of the Free Congress Foundation—Fourth Generation Warfare and the New Traditionalist Movement—have openly declared the contestation of the morality and legitimacy of the current secular political order with the sole objective being the destruction of the present secular political order.  Fox News, with its roots in the Coors-Weyrich Television News Inc. (TVN), and conservative talk radio represent the weaponization of Fourth Generation Warfare.  Lind was correct when he told a U.S. Marine Corps and Department of Defense audience in 1994: “The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.”  We have now seen the real body count and the real effects.

Transnational gangs challenge states in a variety of way. First, they transcend geographical and jurisdictional boundaries. Second, when left unchecked, they can erode the legitimacy of state institutions, co-opt state officials, and exceed state capacity to control their actions. A combination of crime, corruption, and impunity can empower criminal enterprises—gangs and criminal cartels—at the expense of the state. Finally, transnational crime blurs the distinctions between crime and war, local and global, and state and non-state violence. This essay examines these challenges and the evolution of gangs and criminal cartel conflict.

Part II up to this point has emphasized bringing together different segments of the broad right-wing and more or less circling around the Patriot militia movement that lurked in the background of the discussion.  This chapter brings the Patriot militia into greater focus and argues that it was the Christian Reconstructionists through a very small number of select organizations within the Council for National Policy, with extensive links to the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, that carries the most responsibility for forming the Patriot militias.  To be sure, the anti-Semitic, white supremacist Christian Identity movement was there at the creation, and in greater number of participants at the 1992 Estes Park meeting in Colorado where the Patriot movement germinated as an idea (discussed below); indeed, the right-wing had a long history in forming various militia groups over the previous decades.  But, in terms of strategy and organizational linkages, let alone the tremendous communications and organizational network resources available to the Christian Right, the Christian Reconstructionists were the senior partners and the Christian Identity movement the junior partners.

Governments, de facto authorities and rebel-governed areas aspiring to “counterstate sovereignty” all have to cope with the pandemic threat posed by COVID-19. Both official militaries and armed non-state groups find themselves at the centre of emergency plans in response to the pandemic, declaring and enforcing social distancing measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The case of Yemen shows how in conflict-torn or fragmented countries, governments, de facto authorities and rebels may show a convergent, although not coordinated, response to COVID-19.

Abstract: The Roman centurion was perhaps the most important officer in the Roman army. This article argues that during the Republican period, Roman soldiers elected their own centurions, based on a confluence of literary, philological, and epigraphic evidence.  This practice of elective officership has significant implications for our understanding of Roman military leadership and the dynamics of the Republican-era army, which was a citizens’ militia that nonetheless engaged in sophisticated and successful operations across the Mediterranean.  The election of centurions is also important for the ongoing discussion about the broader political culture of the Roman Republic, as the position of centurion represented an important elective office available to citizens outside of the aristocratic political class.

NOTE: The Barbara Coe discussed in this paper, see footnote 8, is not the same as Professor Barbara A. Coe at Western Washington University.

Part III examines William S. Lind’s two Fourth Generation Warfare articles to generate its key operational art principles; it then applies these principles, as well as targeting guidance, to the right-wing paramilitiaries.  This article also examines Lind’s strategic assessments in light of Thomas Chittum’s book, Civil War II.  It is a prelude to the five chapters of Part V.  It closes by showing that William S. Lind, the originator of Fourth Generation Warfare, and John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement, and his links to the white supremacist/nationalist movement, were very close organizationally, ideologically, and strategically.  Part III was started in May 2009.  The later five articles in Part V were written by October 2009.

At 9:02 on the morning of April 19th, 1995, a bomb went off at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The bomb not only killed over 160 people and injured more than 650, but it also shook the illusion held by many Americans of a nation safe from the political unrest and terrorism outside its borders (an illusion that would be shattered for good on 9/11). In the hours and days following the bombing, the media and law enforcement authorities focused on the Muslim terrorists they believed were responsible, including a Muslim Oklahoma City resident detained at Heathrow Airport in London. On April 20th, one day after bombing, another Oklahoma City resident, Iraqi refugee Suhair al-Mosawi, was attacked in his home as retaliation for the bombing. When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – two white, Christian, home-grown anti-government activists – were arrested, what became evident was that these were ‘American’ terrorists. In spite of the initial shock of the bombing and focus on Muslims, this was far from a new phenomenon. For many experts who had been researching and monitoring the extreme right, the bombing was the culmination of a fifteen-year trajectory of violence. In response to the bombing, hearings were held, anti-terror legislation was passed, arrests were made and numerous books written and films made about the phenomenon. Yet, following the events of 9/11, Oklahoma City and the domestic extreme right were pushed to the margins of history and memory, as terrorism and terrorists were redefined as Islamic or Islamist, and Christianity and patriotism were evoked in America’s defense.

Throughout American history, both terrorism and extremism have been constructed, evoked or ignored strategically by the state, media and public at different points, in order to disown and demonize political movements whenever their ideologies and objectives become problematic or inconvenient – because they overlap with, and thus compromise, the legitimacy of the dominant ideology and democratic credentials of the state, because they conflict with the dominant ideology or hegemonic order, because they offend the general (voting) public, or because they expose the fallacies of national unity and bi-polar opposition in the face of foreign enemies or international conflicts, such as the war on terror. This chapter looks at how domestic extreme right terrorism has been constructed, represented, evoked or ignored in the American political imagination in the post-civil rights era, with a particular focus on its changing status following the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11.""

After more than two decades of ongoing violent conflict, armed groups—however fleeting their existence—have become an integral feature of the eastern Congo’s social-political order. They are not a temporary aberration in what is otherwise a normal society. They are at the heart of the way power is exercised and experienced. Moreover, armed groups do not stand apart from either society or the state apparatus. They are deeply embedded in social networks that regroup state and non-state actors and that stretch from the very local to the national and sometimes the sub-regional (Great Lakes area) and international levels.

This report analyses the stability, inclusivity and levels of violence of both the political settlement of the Congo as a whole and of political settlements in the conflict-ridden east. It shows that in each of these political arenas, armed groups and violence play a different role, and examines how these arenas mutually influence each other. The relative importance of armed groups as either resources or threats to the power of the presidential patronage network shapes its policies towards the east, such as initiatives for military operations or negotiations. These policies influence the role that armed groups play locally. This role, in turn, shapes to what extent and how national politicians engage with armed groups; for instance, whether they support their mobilization or demobilization.

The link of Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association with the ALEC corporate land grab was integral to the overall strategy at the Bundy ranch confrontation.  The main Fourth Generation Warfare claim made by ALEC, Oath Keepers, CSPOA, the Tenth Amendment Center, and the John Birch Society centers on delegitimizing the federal government’s constitutionally correct ownership of public lands in the West.

El artículo se centra en el análisis y la documentación sobre los muertos y desaparecidos que combatieron como voluntarios en las diferentes columnas organizadas por las Milicias Antifascistas de Cataluña, busca aportar información respecto al sistema administrativo que regulaba los derechos legales de los milicianos muertos en combate. En este abordaje se demuestra la importancia de la organización de las Milicias Antifascistas de Catalunya y su estructura administrativa, especialmente la relativa al pago de subsidios de guerra, en la trazabilidad de las fuentes documentales. También se aporta información sobre la evolución del sistema que, a partir de agosto de 1936, trataba de garantizar el derecho a las compensaciones por muerte o invalidez de los combatientes. A la vez, ofrece una primera aproximación con datos cuantitativos y cualitativos respecto al total de bajas que sufrió esta organización entre el 24 de julio y el 31 de diciembre de 1936.
Paralelamente, busca aportar una metodología de trabajo complementaria a la exhumación de restos humanos de fosas o cementerios, que permite identificar los restos físicos de combatientes asociados a campos de batalla de la Guerra de España. Esta se enmarca en las recientes iniciativas legales que tienen lugar en España orientadas a cumplimentar políticas públicas de memoria democrática. La metodología se basa en la identificación de las víctimas y su participación orgánica en unidades militares en el momento de su defunción.

NOTE: The Barbara Coe discussed in this paper is not Professor Barbara A. Coe at Western Washington University. Please do not confuse the two.

These five articles were written by late 2009.  They were my first analysis linking William S. Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare strategy to John Tanton’s anti-immigration movement; the anti-immigration movement to the white nationalist or white supremacist movement; showing how the Christian Right took over the primary vehicle of the anti-immigration movement, namely, the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps; and, showing that William S. Lind’s role, beyond developing the Fourth Generation Warfare strategy, has during the time period of this initial study (2005-2009) written strategic assessments in the form of brief articles that, when combined with Thomas Chittum’s book, Civil War II: The Coming Breakup of America, give insight into how the Patriot militia movement may have perceived the strategic situation.  As my first analytical attempt, no doubt there are errors of judgement.  But, this analysis drove me to understand the Christian Right—thus the first book that will be published here is on the Christian Right—and the Patriot militia.  The latter is the topic of the second book, of which several draft chapters have already been posted to academia.edu.  The third book covers the Tea Party movement.

This paper examines the role of coercion in the history of Iraqi state formation.  It contends that the twin processes of war-making, competition in a highly militarized regional system, and state-making, suppression of significant internal challengers, shaped the way the Iraqi state dealt with society and led to a state that constantly sought to gain a monopoly over the use of violence and eliminate armed non-state actors.  This trajectory is rare in much of the developing world, where many states have accommodated or even encouraged armed non-state actors to provide local security.  The interaction between insecure regimes, powerful societal actors, and imperialist interventions, spurred Iraq’s leaders to augment and centralize their coercive power.  The added element of regional and international rivalries meant that the Iraqi state could not permit non-state actors to have access to the means of violence; when they did, the results were disastrous.  This process culminated in the emergence of the hyper-militarized Ba’th society, where nearly one in twenty Iraqis were associated with the state security forces.  At the same time, since the fall of the Ba’th in 2003, the Iraqi state has struggled to assert coercive power over society, reverting to an older form of bargaining between state and armed non-state actors.

This paper examines what effect the Iranian state ideology has on its engagement with Afghan militias. The central argument is that militarism and the structure of the Iranian foreign policy bureaucracy are core reasons why, how and who it engages with. Despite the violent antagonism between Sunnis and Shias in the region, religion has far less effect on Iran’s foreign policy in Afghanistan. The paper details that in Afghanistan, militias and warlords are actors that have similar coercive abilities to the Afghan state and so their autonomy, indicated by their ideology, regulates how Iran engages with them. The structure of the militias like the Iranian state allows them to engage with competing and conflicting actors. A theme throughout this paper is that in Afghanistan state-militia relations are less hierarchical than conventional literature has indicated in other regions, the term ‘proxy’ is shown to have limited analytical ability for this case study. The theoretical frameworks for the analysis is Critical Constructivism and the Bureaucratic Political Model. Although not without their limitations, these frameworks complement each other to show why, how and who Iran engages with.

Texto que trata sobre la formación de las primeras unidades militares en Canarias en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. Compañías de infantería que luego cristalizaron en el Batallón de Infantería de Canarias, que combatieron en las guerras que afrontó España entre 1793-1814. (páginas 6 y 7).

THIS PAPER WAS LAST EDITED ON NOVEMBER 18, 2010.  It still has some editing required, but it represents my first effort to link the Christian Right's Council for National Policy to all the major social movements on the right, including the Pioneer Fund to the CNP itself, the anti-immigrant movement, the militia movement, and the Tea Party movement.  This paper uses the term "Tea Bag Party" which was the movement's first name.  It also focuses on a key organization that receives no recognition, TheVanguard.org, but which Bill Berkowitz rightly noticed and brought to some attention.

According to Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception” is established by the sovereign's decision to suspend the law, and the archetypical state of exception is the Nazi concentration camp. At the same time, Agamben notes that boundaries have become blurred since then, such that even spaces like refugee camps can be thought of as states of exception because they are both inside and outside the law. This article draws on the notion of the state of exception in order to examine the Syrian refugee camp cum shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab as well as to analyze questions of religious authority, ritual practice, and pious devotion to Sayyida Zaynab. Though Sayyida Zaynab and many of her Twelver Shiʿi devotees resemble Agamben's figure of homo sacer, who marked the origin of the state of exception, they also defy Agamben's theory that humans necessarily become animal-like, leading nothing more than “bare lives” (or zoē) in states of exception.