EISS 2025 - Annual Conference

Session

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

PRIVA

26 Jun 2025, 15:30

Conference Room "Ilias Koukouvelis" (University of Macedonia)

Conveners

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

• Zarras Konstantinos (University of Macedonia)

Description

Private and extra-legal actors are at the center of politics today. A proliferation of these actors — including mercenaries, private security companies, cartels, gangs, local militias, and rebels, among others — has been identified as the central source of the state’s loss of monopoly over the use of violence and influence over its territories and communities. Throughout the world, these actors have been fulfilling political functions through the use and threat of violence and by cultivating complex and overlapping relationships with each other, local communities, and the state. The behaviors of these actors and interactions between them, local communities, and the state have significant political and social consequences that we are only beginning to understand. The panel aims to explore these complex links and interactions at the local, national and transnational levels. It aims to bring scholars seeking to understand the history, dynamics, and policy implications of this increasingly complicated landscape. It intends to address the following questions: How and why do extra-legal actors use violence, and what are the consequences of this violence? How and why do these same actors seek to provide goods and services to communities and create social and political orders? How have states responded to these actors, and why have they sometimes chosen to collaborate with and support them and others to combat them fiercely? How have citizens and local communities responded to these actors? What moral and legal challenges do these interactions imply? The panel welcomes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to the connections between private and public spheres in international security.

323. Big tech at war: The infrastructural politics of public-private relations

Tobias Liebetrau (University of Copenhagen)

26/06/2025, 15:30

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

Paper Abstract (Closed Panels)

This article examines the role of big tech companies in international politics through an infrastructural lens, focusing on their involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war. We situate the article in IR literature examining the public and the private not as a distinction but as public-private relations, and we draw inspiration from the infrastructural turn in social science to develop an approach...

267. We Are Peers Now: States’ Relations with Violent Non-State Actors That Became State/Sub-State Actors

Ido Gadi Raz (PhD fast track student of International Relations)

26/06/2025, 15:50

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

Paper Abstract (Closed Panels)

The relationship between states and violent non-state actors (VNSAs) has been widely explored in International Relations and Security Studies over the past two and a half decades. Scholars have examined state-VNSA dynamics through frameworks of sponsorship, alliances, delegation, and proxy warfare, as well as through conflict and rivalry. However, a growing yet underexplored phenomenon is the...

303. Private military companies as proxy forces in international politics with special reference to the Russian Wagner Group/African Corps and its operations in Africa

Theo Neethling (University of the Free State)

26/06/2025, 16:10

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

Panel Proposal (Open Panels)

Since the Cold War’s end, private military companies (PMCs) have increasingly served as third parties in proxy wars, with states and non-state actors relying on them for military operations. These actors have become a key feature of external involvement in contemporary conflicts. Notable PMCs include Blackwater in Iraq, Executive Outcomes in Angola and Sierra Leone, and the Russian Wagner...

348. From Revolt to Rule: Insurgency as Proto-State Formation

Marnix Provoost

26/06/2025, 16:30

Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

Paper Abstract (Closed Panels)

State formation is a continuous process, marked by the centralisation and monopolisation of power to establish authority over a population within a defined territory. This paper argues that insurgency is a centrifugal force challenging this centralisation. However, insurgents are not merely destructive but, driven by an idea of an alternative political order, are establishing a new form of...