Micropolitics of Violence - Böcker

In "Intervention as Indirect Rule", Alex Veit uses a close study of the district of Ituri in the Congo, a major battlefield and a laboratory for international intervention, to explore the micropolitics of warfare and statebuilding. Combining detailed firsthand empirical data with a historically informed analysis, Veit shows the effect that contemporary humanitarian interventions have on state-society relations. He also pays particular attention to the question of why the very organizations that should be helping with international statebuilding efforts - local authorities and civil society groups - so often turn out to be corrupt or hostile. Ultimately Veit argues that international intervention tends inadvertently to replicate - or even amplify - historical structures of political inequality, rather than establishing a liberal form of statehood.

One of the keys to dealing with militant Islamic groups is understanding how they work with, relate to, and motivate their constituencies. "Mobilizing the Faithful" offers a pair of detailed case studies - of the Egyptian groups al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad and Lebanon's Hizbullah - to identify typical forms of support relationships, development patterns, and dynamics of both radicalization and restraint. The insights it offers into the crucial relationship between militants and the communities from which they arise are widely applicable to violent insurgencies not only in the Middle East but around the world.

In "The Normality of Civil War", Teresa Koloma Beck uses theories of the everyday to analyze the social processes of civil war, specifically the type of conflict that is characterized by the expansion of violence into so-called normal life. She looks beyond simplistic notions of victims and perpetrators to reveal the complex shifting interdependencies that emerge during wartime. She also explores how the process of normalization effects both armed groups and the civilian population. A brief but smart analysis, "The Normality of Civil War" gets at the root of the social dynamics of war and what lies ahead for the participants after its end.