Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation.

Edited by Diane E. Davis and Anthony W. Pereira. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. $65.00.

This is a book that revisits the war–state making nexus, incorporates the role of guerrilla groups, brigands, and paramilitary forces in institution building, carves a role for the police corps in theories of state formation, and, not less importantly, adds to the usual set of cases often included in this type of collection the experience of the United States. For all of this, the effort should be praised and taken very seriously, not the least of all because, as one reads through the volume, one senses the challenges posed both for authors and editors involved in the collection. In addition to some well-known authors who have contributed worthwhile chapters, the editors have profited from the collaboration of innovative younger scholars who have tried to add new insights and fresh research to these subject matters, and they have done so elegantly and solidly.

Taken together, this collection is a must read for those interested in collective action, armed forces, police forces, and nonconventional warfare in connection with state building and democracy. The editors have provided a detailed and solid introduction and conclusion—although the conclusions are, as is usually the case, somewhat repetitive. The introduction by Diane Davis sets up the problems the book attempts to tackle and provides a sort of short scholarly history of each of these—by now traditional—questions. The conclusion by Anthony W. Pereira does a very good job of summarizing arguments and findings.

The collection possesses additional virtues. For example, providing the reader with the right dosage of scholarship on the right type of subject remains one of the greatest tests of edited volumes. This one passes the test with distinction. The book, for instance, gives us the right dosage of work on conventional armed forces, and it does it from agile perspectives that are most welcome in a field of inquiry that, more often than not, has theoretically lagged behind others and produced routine and almost tedious studies. And as the title promises, the majority of the chapters (8 out of 12) focus on less researched subject matters: nontraditional forces or even groups whose power derives from their prior affiliation with armed forces, as is the case with veterans.

Most authors in this volume arrive at a similar conclusion: first, that irregular armed forces and police can enjoy—and do enjoy—different degrees of legitimacy and popularity during important periods of institution building; and second, that this affects politics at the local and national level in various degrees. A general point they suggest is well taken: Unlike traditional views on these issues, the influence that irregular armed forces and police can wield on politics and institutions is not just a consequence of their military strength. Their legitimacy in the eyes of the population may matter even more.

Like most edited volumes, however, this falls prey to a major problem: how to correlate contributions from different scholars into a coherent theoretical statement about a specific subject matter. There is, no doubt, a core theme that runs through the book: how armed groups of different types—whether independent from, connected to, or opposing the state in different ways—influence state building and development. Yet because most chapters focus on questions that are not necessarily related to the next chapter's subject matter, the volume is in need of a fair dosage of intellectual elaboration to establish a baseline from which the reader could grasp how these contributions would inform a general theory of state formation.

Most edited volumes confront this problem, and only a few are able to overcome it. Despite all its virtues, this is not, unfortunately, one of them. Questions of conventional warfare, or the role of the police in local politics and its connections to the military, for instance, are only distantly related. The real challenge is precisely to make that connection. One can see how problems associated with the post–American Civil War mobilization of Union veterans in the United States, and the nature of paramilitary forces in Colombia in relation to democracy, can belong to the same type of general question. Yet one needs some scholarly elaboration to make that linkage explicit. Such elaboration, unfortunately, is absent from the very good introduction and conclusion that the editors offer, and that elegantly sum up the major questions and conclusions of the chapters. The same can be argued about most authors: The exceptions to the rule are Charles Tilly, Anne Raffin, William Reno, and the short chapter by Miguel Centeno.

In other words, while most of the chapters of Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation are interesting, worthwhile reading, and offer precious data that deserve to be incorporated into a comparative theory of state making, only a few authors dare to risk encompassing theoretical statements. Thus, despite all the praise that it deserves, the collection still does not do enough to integrate its different contributions into a comprehensive, comparative framework that could be taken as a general reference for future work on this very important aspect of state building.