Although the notion of interstitial war that I advance in this book is a novel one, several large and well-explored areas of study provide useful conceptual tools for understanding what I mean by a sovereign interstice, and where existing models come closest to explaining the same kinds of violence that I am concerned with here.
In this chapter, I bring these useful conceptual tools and applicable models together under three headings. I begin by considering various key perspectives on âwar, the state, and the state of warâ1 within fields such as political science, military history, and international relations. Following this, I use insights from the fields of political geography (specifically, John Agnewâs notion of sovereignty regimes) to add a systemic and spatial dimension to these key perspectives on warfare, such that the utility of thinking about the locatedness of outwardly directed state violence both in physical place and social space becomes clear. Finally, I introduce and specify the key elements of my own model of the sovereign interstice, whose application to the cases collected in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 forms the core of this book.
War
In his 1964 introduction to the new edition of Quincy Wrightâs A Study of War, Karl Deutsch wrote that â[nothing] less than ⊠the understanding of war and the possible ways to its abolition ⊠is on the agenda of our time.â2 Five decades later, we are still trying to âunderstandâ war; however, the important thing about Deutschâs statement is not just its ambition (i.e., that war would be understood for once and for all during âour timeâ), but rather the very notion that war could be treated as a phenomenon in its own right rather than only a by-product of bigger structures such as politics, human nature, class exploitation, or âracialâ destiny.
Before works such as A Study of War, the notion that two regionally and historically distinct episodes of conflict might be assigned functional equivalence through their reduction into a set of salient characteristics (e.g., type of regimes at war, number of fatalities), and directly studied to determine common inputs or outputs, was unknown. Less than 50 years later, however, this practice is so common as to be second nature to the war enumerator. In this regard, Wright and those who have continued to build on his work (such as Small and Singer) have indeed changed the way that we study war.
However, once we take Wright, Richardson, Small, and Singer at their word, and accept the notion that âwarâ is a regular enough phenomenon that scholars should direct effort toward enumerating wars, assembling them into datasets, and comparing them, we soon find that the very task of defining what counts as an incidence of âwarâ is itself a process bedeviled by different and competing perspectives on, theories of, methods for the study of, and thus definitions of war. While Wright and Richardson confronted this challenge through their own methods, they did not do so in ways that have settled the question, âwhat is war?â
Different perspectives on this question thus persist: and in choosing between (or combining) these competing perspectives, we find ourselves having to ask a range of questions. Is war to be primarily understood in terms of the actors/agents involved (who fights, why they fight, how they fight), or is it caused by various systemic features? Has war changed in nature over time and depending on context, or is its nature timeless? Last, and specifically important given the particular focus of the present project: how can we decide whether a given sequence or cluster of widespread, violent events (e.g., the decolonization conflicts in Africa) is best understood as (i) war, (ii) some particular or a unique kind of war, distinct from other particular/unique kinds, or (iii) some other kind of phenomenon entirely?
Arguing in in favor of a broader and more inclusive definition of war, Joseph Salerno argues that war obtains whenever some have power and others do not:
We thus arrive at a universal, praxeological truth about war: it is the outcome of ⊠conflict inherent in the political relationshipâthe relationship between ruler and ruled ⊠[the] parasitic classâthe rulers; their police, military, and civil servants; and their supporting special-interest coalition(s)âmakes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and ratchet up its exploitation ⊠the conflict between ruler and ruled is a permanent condition.3
A similarly cross-cutting perspective is employed by Robert Layton when he argues, from an anthropological perspective, that
[h]uman warfare arises when the web of social relationship is compromised. Human societies are complex systems and vulnerable to periods of disorder ⊠[the] manipulative activities of leaders play a part in fomenting war, whether they are local Big Men in small-scale, decentralized societies or the leaders of nation states.4
Lastly, Charles Tilly takes a different route than Salerno and Layton, but arrives at the same destination, that is, that we should loosen the strictures around what we count as âwar,â and what kinds of groups can be thought of as waging it. In The Politics of Collective Violence,5 for example, Tilly identifies six different types of collective, interpersonal violence: broken negotiations, opportunism, brawls, scattered attacks, violent rituals, and coordinated destruction.6 When the latter three kinds of violence co-occur, Tilly calls this composite phenomenon âwar,â and in so doing produces a conception of war that applies to the contemporary, High Modern, and classical battlefield alike.
Various approaches to capturing the diversity of âwarâ thus exist, but none conclusively settles the debate around what to think of as war. As Vasquez points out, some of our difficulties in defining war stem simply from the fact that âwarâ is a noun in the English language rather than a verb.7 After all, war conceived of as an institution, or phenomenon, in its own right (i.e., âwarâ used as a noun), permits different routes of inquiry than war conceived of as a relational,8 inter-institutional behaviorâthat is, âwarâ used as a verb or âwarfareâ to focus on the use of war rather than war itself.
However, this distinction (and the associated definitional back-and-forth over âwarâ) notwithstanding, we still find ourselves in need of some kind of working definition of war in order to identify it for further study. Wright and Richardson inaugurated the use of threshold numbers of deaths in battle as the sign that a war was taking place, and many (starting with Small and Singer) have followed their route. However, I want to specifically draw attention to Istvan Kendeâs operationalization of war as useful for the work I conduct in this book. Kende writes:
We define war as any armed conflict in which all of the following criteria obtain:
Activities of regular armed forces (military, police forces, etc.) at least on one sideâthat is, the presence and engagement of the armed forces of the government in power;A certain degree of organization and organized fighting on both opposing sides, even if this organization extends to organized defence [sic] only;A certain continuity between the armed clashes, however sporadic. Centrally organized guerilla forces are also regarded as making war, insofar as their activities extend over a considerable part of the country concerned.9
This definition of war is particularly interesting to me because Kende was specifically attempting to fit a concept dominated by its statist origins (i.e., war) around a body of empirical data in which states were playing an increasingly non-exclusive role. Indeed, writing in 1978, Kende saw in his data the emergence of a very particular kind of war:
The current main type of wars is the anti-regime (A) type war, mainly with foreign participation (Category A/I) ⊠[we] have stressed the importance of the change which made this kind into the main type of war instead of the border wars which dominated in the past. The fact that type A but mainly type A/I wars are in such a majority is an unequivocal consequence of the current political situation.10
Kendeâs âCategory A/Iâ wars thus embody many of the features of interstitial war to be discussed in what follows, and the same goes for his definition, which attempted to leave space both for states and non-states in the practice of war. For this reason, and without implying that war must include the state by definition, we can nonetheless observe in the diverse works of Tilly, Salerno, Vasquez, and Layton mentioned earlier that war and the actions of large political collectives go hand in hand. We thereby find ourselves agreeing with Kendeâs implication (via the first element of his definition) that whatever else we think we âunderstandâ about war, we can be confident that it in some way continues to feature the pursuit of objectives by states. I turn to what it means to talk of states as entities pursuing objectives next.
The State
Max Weberâs Politics As a Vocation outlines four characteristics of a state: (i) it is constituted by its means rather than its goals; (ii) these means are founded in violence; (iii) the violence must be acceded to or legitimated by the governed; and (iv) a clear differentiation is to be found between different states based on the overlap between ownership of the material and immaterial technologies of violence.11 Furthermore, for Weber, the institutional and territorial boundaries of the associated society are the same. Indeed, â[t]erritory is a characteristic of the state.â12
With reference to the specific issue of how to define the state, it must be noted that subsequent work on the state has focused on different characteristics than Weberâs. Where Weber identifies the establishment of a stable coercive monopoly as a key element in the creation of what we today recognize as âstates,â Roberto Ungerâs Plasticity into Power, for example, suggests the opposite: polities in which the rulers found it too easy to defend themselves against the people are precisely those which tended to stagnate and fragment over history, to be replaced by more durable egalitarian polities.13
While Unger and Weber are arguing from different positions on the role of coercion, they share the idea that we might best understand the state by observing its successes or failures at establishing a coercive monopoly. In contrast, and as a third perspective on how to recognize and delineate the state for further study, Joel Migdalâs work on the state advances a âstate-in-societyâ model, in which rather than being an actual or would-be coercive monopolist, the state is just one (a...