Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World

In a world of growing security challenges, non-state armed actors have captured significant attention from scholars concerned with regime stability and the consolidation of national states. But the preoccupation with national political dynamics has eclipsed the study of non-state armed actors who struggle to secure economic dominion, and whose activities reveal alternative networks of power, authority, independence, and self-governance unfolding on a variety of territorial scales both smaller and larger than the nation-state. With a focus on actors as wide-ranging as private police, gangs, and mafias, this article charts the proliferation and significance of non-state armed action structured around economic activities, and assesses the nature of violence and insecurity generated by these activities in comparison to more conventional politically oriented non-state action. Drawing evidence primarily from middle-income countries of the global south, where political regimes are relatively more stable but a wide variety of non-state armed actors still proliferate, it examines the new ‘spatiality’ of non-armed state action directed toward economic sovereignty, argues that it forms the basis for alternative imagined communities of allegiance, and assesses the implications for the future of the traditional nation-state. After highlighting the overlap and co-existence of multiple categories of non-state armed actors and how they impact the security, legitimacy, and stability of nation-states, the essay concludes with questions about conventional categorizations of states, armed and non-armed actors, and the nature of sovereignty in the contemporary era. © 2009, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.