Militia

This study explores and critically examines the role of indigenous mechanisms (the Inter-Tribal Reconciliation Conferences-ITRCs) in resolving tribal conflicts in South Darfur State of Western Sudan. The fundamental question raised by this study is: have these reconciliation con…

This paper reconstructs the history of the Governor’s Guards in Columbia, South Carolina from 1843 to 1874. In addition to examining the conditions that influenced the formation of this antebellum volunteer militia company, this paper analyzes the ages, wealth, class, and occupa…

This thesis explores the role of local defense forces in counterinsurgency campaigns, specifically the dynamic that exists between these groups and the state. In many instances, as in Afghanistan today, a state that is in the midst of fighting an insurgency lacks the capacity to…

How do states maintain their authority given that even weak non-state groups are now capable of challenging states by resorting to irregular warfare? In Part I of the dissertation, I propose that one of the ways in which states pursue internal security is by recruiting civilians…

This dissertation considers the sources of variation in the ability of nonstate military actors to both resist and recover from – in short, to survive – confrontations with much stronger conventional militaries. While much of the existing literature on civil war focuses on struc…

This dissertation is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and 40 in-depth interviews with members of the Michigan militia. Militia members are mostly white men who believe in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Armed with rifles, they practice paramilita…

The Hamidiye Light Cavalry, a special militia organized by the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II in 1890 out of select Kurdish tribes, was an important institution in its day, and impacted many aspects of the lives of its members, their neighbors, and the larger society of which they…

My dissertation examines the popular construction of American citizenship in the early nineteenth century by focusing closely on the experiences of the Shakers, a sectarian and controversial Christian church. Americans often worked out the meaning of their citizenship in real wo…

How did political order emerge in Tajikistan and Georgia after the violent chaos of the Soviet collapse? Despite enormous structural weaknesses--the absence of a national army, impassable mountains, ethnic cleavages, poverty, and foreign-backed insurgencies--stable regimes conso…