Research

Book Project: Civic Vice, Civic Virtue: Militia’s in Theory and Practice

With Paul L. Johnson

Militias regularly emerge in conflict and non-conflict settings as antagonists to the state, allies of the state, as well as in the context of state failure. Yet, despite all being called “militias,” they vary widely in terms of their origins, size, staying-power, and effect on human security. This book will focus on answering the following question: How and under what conditions do militias contribute to improvement or degradation in human security?

This book will advance theoretical and empirical research on militias both by aggregating disparate strands of research on the subject and by disaggregating the study of militias according to pertinent organizational features. Current work on militias resembles an archipelago, with “islands of research” that generally tend to study only one form, usually in a single context, such as: studies of “proxy warriors” or informal pro-government militias; studies of anti-rebel civilian defense forces used to hold territory during civil war; studies of vigilante forces used to provide law and order; and studies of militaries and military components organized in militia form.

Our project addresses these shortcomings in the literature by showcasing a variety of militia organizations from around the world with a rich diversity of origins and in a variety of contexts. By emphasizing descriptive inference, this volume allows readers from one strand of militia research to become familiar with other kinds of militia forces, and policymakers to get a sense of the wide variety of militia forms and outcomes potentially at issue.

Book Project: Good Arms and Good Laws – Machiavelli, Political Violence, and Regime-Type

My book project turns to the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli to explore the link between political violence and regime type. My dissertation, entitled “Good Arms and Good Laws – Machiavelli, Political Violence, and Regime-Type,” articulates what we can learn from Machiavelli’s understanding of the different ways democratic and non-democratic regimes address what I call the central political problem of violence. Every regime, democratic or non-democratic, must find a way to create effective mechanisms of violence (militaries, police forces, and so on) that do not also become tools for oppressing the citizens they are supposed to defend. Machiavelli’s answer is to design institutions that are sufficiently capable of exercising force, sufficiently constrained in that exercise, and sufficiently responsive to the right political impulses during that exercise. After beginning with Machiavelli’s treatment of civilian-military relations and their relationship to his concept of citizenship in The Art of War, my dissertation explores Machiavelli’s treatment of autocratic institutions in The Prince, democratic ones in The Discourses on Livy, and hybrid ones in The Florentine Histories.

For Machiavelli both autocracies and democracies require an elite-citizen partnership in order to address the central political problem of violence, though the terms of that partnership vary across regime-type. In autocracies (or ‘principalities’ to use Machiavelli’s language), citizen participation is limited to the militia. The citizen militia constrains and augments the executive’s power in important ways (such as guaranteeing the principle of non-oppression), but it is only in democracies (‘republics,’ in Machiavelli’s terms) that citizens take an active role in deliberating over and passing judgment upon the use of violence. This fundamentally agonistic partnership draws upon the disparate strengths of the citizenry and the elites to address effectively the central political problem of violence.

Working Paper: “Populism and Machiavelli’s Citizen Militia – A reconsideration of The Prince.”

Machiavelli’s political thought is full of apparent contradictions. Nearly every position he takes in one text is contradicted elsewhere in that text or in another text. One important exception is his position on the militia. Machiavelli is a strikingly consistent proponent of citizen militias across his writings. His writings share a strong family resemblance in their positive treatments of citizen militias, their condemnation of other kinds of arms, and the connection they make between praiseworthy leaders and the creation and maintenance of popular arms. While some authors have explored some of the implications of Machiavelli’s views on the militia on his thought, none have explored the fact and implications of Machiavelli’s consistency on the militia across his entire body of work. This article therefore makes a novel contribution to the scholarship on Machiavelli and positions him as an interlocutor in larger normative and empirical discussions of militias. In this paper, I sketch his position on the militia, in four key works: the Cagione dell’Ordinanza, the Prince, The Art of War, and The Discourses on Livy in turn. I then describe two elements of their larger significance: the impact of his position on the militia to his supposed republicanism and populism. For the purposes of this workshop, I discuss two questions Machiavelli’s thought poses for wider normative and empirical study of militias in the final section.