Conclusion

The study proposes to analyze practices in non-state armed groups as socially rather than spatially (Kalyvas, 2006) or economically (Weinstein, 2007) differentiated. Practices are not just shaped by economic conditions or degrees of control exerted within a certain area but also reflect social structures within fields. They are shaped by the respective classificatory discourse of the agents. The analysis is based upon a slightly adjusted theoretical field approach by Pierre Bourdieu and the conceptualization of power techniques by Michel Foucault. Instead of asking which disciplinary techniques might be effective (van der Haer et al., 2011), it asks why commanders opt for certain practices and not others. And sometimes, it examines why they do not opt for practices such as proper trainings, political indoctrination, or combat control. They opt not for what is effective from a general military perspective but for what ‘makes sense’ to them, what they believe is effective. Most of the current research on civil wars comes from political and economic science, accounting for the bulk of the recent progress in theorizing insurgent and incumbent violence and for a turn towards the micro-politics of armed groups. However, collective violence and war remain at the periphery of sociological thought, and those few exceptions mostly deal with the question of how to integrate violence into the idea of modernity and social order (for an overview, see Malešević, 2010). One reason for this might be that sociological theory seldom examines societies outside of Europe and North America and still largely sticks to the idea that social order is non-violent. Violence is understood as the breakdown of orderly social exchange rather than its continuation. Oftentimes, civil wars are interpreted as the resurfacing of archaic barbarity that undermines modernity (e.g., Kaplan, 2005), not as organized and essentially social processes.