US & Russian sponsored paramilitaries since 1991

[pjb]

I'd also be interested to see how you're going to quantify and classify paramilitaries. Are you going to control for operational region? (Paramilitaries may more similar based on constraints and culture of region than based on who was sponsoring them.)

I wrote a quant research paper on internal security forces (police + paramilitaries), my focus was different, but I found the best consistent data on paramilitaries in the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Military Balance publications. The MB doesn't list foreign sponsorship of paramilitaries, so you'd probably have to do the legwork on that yourself.

(If you want to see what I did, my paper is here: http://thesimonscenter.org/wp-conten...-002-APR13.pdf)

[AmericanPride]

Hi PJB,

Thanks for the references.

First, I'm going to classify paramilitaries by status: official, official-covert, official-clandestine, and unofficial. Then I am going to classify them by type: law enforcement, special operations, political, militia, non-military security, and criminal. I want to capture the broadest range possible of paramilitary forces while excluding terrorist organizations and regular police forces.

I have to devise a method to quantify sponsorship other than material and financial aid (i.e. political support). I also have to devise a number of operational activities to form the basis of the dataset measuring the influence on conflict outcomes.

[Venenum]

SSI's Max Boot is one of the most authoritative sources. He has written a book called "Invisible Armies" which includes a database.

[RedRaven]

Link to the aforementioned database (at least a cool visualization of the data in the database):

http://www.cfr.org/wars-and-warfare/...tracker/p29917

[AmericanPride]

Ven and Red,

Thanks for the resources. One of the questions I want to answer is how the US and Russia leverage these organizations in national security policy (and relatedly, if there's a political feedback loop back to Capitol Hill). I want to avoid the monolithic trap of realism in explaining state behavior, so that is another gap to be filled. There's the well documented friction between DoD and CIA during Rumsfeld's tenure. Is that kind of bureaucratic infighting present here too? Did it influence effectiveness?

[davidbfpo]

American Pride,

It maybe worth looking - for the Russian aspect - on the threads: Early Soviet COIN Experience in Central Asia @ Early Soviet COIN Experience in Central Asia Then The North Caucasus: Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia @ http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=1271 Finally there maybe help in the two threads on Georgia's South Ossetia Conflict - Military Commentary and the Military Commentary.

Do you include the Soviet practice in Afghanistan of purchasing the loyalty of the warlords? See:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9483

[AmericanPride]

David,
Thanks for the recommendations. The Soviet-backed Afghan warlords would fall under unofficial militia (not a formal government agency and organization is an armed group without a coherent political agenda or established political apparatus). But as far as my timeline, I'm looking to start with the birth of the Russian Federation. There are a number of organizations in the Caucasus of course and possibly more in the Tajik and Uzbek conflicts of the 1990s (I'm not familiar with those conflicts so that requires examination). Not to mention Russia's various official security organs (OMON, MVD troops, etc). My next step will be to work through identifying operational activities to build a quantitative tool to measure their influence on conflict outcomes (i.e. did the group participate in human rights violations?).