Friend or Foe: Militia Intelligence and Ethnic Violence in the Lebanese Civil War

— —

Nils Hägerdal

Friend or Foe

Militia Intelligence and Ethnic Violence in the Lebanese Civil War

Nils Hägerdal

$57.95

Paperback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Columbia University Press
06 July 2021

History; Politics & government

Series: Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics

When civil conflicts break out in plural societies, violence often occurs along group divides-running the risk of spiraling into ethnic cleansing. Yet for militants who do not seek ethnic separation as a political goal, indiscriminate attacks are detrimental to their cause. Under what circumstances are such combatants more or less likely to commit ethnic violence?

Nils Hägerdal examines the Lebanese civil war to offer a new theory that highlights the interplay of ethnicity and intelligence gathering. He shows that when militias can obtain reliable intelligence-particularly in demographically intermixed areas where information can cross ethnic boundaries-they are likely to refrain from indiscriminate tactics. Access to local intelligence helps armed groups distinguish between neutral and hostile non-coethnics to target individual opponents while leaving civilians in peace. Conversely, when militias struggle to access local information, they often fall back on ethnicity as a proxy for political allegiance, with bloody consequences. As intelligence capabilities shape the course of sectarian strife, the role of ethnicity can vary even within a particular conflict.

Hägerdal conducted sixteen months of fieldwork in Lebanon, interviewing former militia fighters and commanders and collecting novel statistical evidence. He combines documentation by government agencies, NGOs, local news media, and the United Nations with firsthand narratives by participants to provide an unparalleled account of the processes that generate violence or coexistence when a diverse society descends into armed conflict. Theoretically innovative and descriptively rich, Friend or Foe sheds new light on the logic and dynamics of ethnic violence in civil wars.

By: Nils Hägerdal
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231200653
ISBN 10: 023120065X
Series: Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 06 July 2021
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Nils Hagerdal is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Reviews for Friend or Foe: Militia Intelligence and Ethnic Violence in the Lebanese Civil War

In Friend or Foe, Hagerdal offers a powerful theory of ethnic violence in non-separatist ethnic civil wars, which he tests with an impressive mix of fieldwork and original data on demographics, migration, and violence for over 1,400 rural villages and urban neighborhoods in Lebanon. -- Peter Krause, coeditor of <i>Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science</i> Hagerdal has written an excellent book on the conditions that lead to indiscriminate ethnic violence during civil war. Using an impressive array of original statistical and qualitative information on Lebanon's Civil War, Hagerdal convincingly argues that Information asymmetries explain the variation in levels of violence. Where intelligence information is reliable, there's less violence, and when it is less reliable, there is more violence. -- Amaney A. Jamal, author of <i>Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All?</i>