This chapter considers the role of Russia’s ground-based contingent in the Russian military operation in Syria. The chapter, which covers the period 2015-2021, identifies six key strategic functions of the contingent, which is small in size but diverse in its composition. The functions reach beyond base security and support to the aerial forces that have spearheaded Russia’s operation, and include also the ability to carry out high-value tasks, provide capacity building to allied forces, facilitate ally coordination, and support escalation management. Importantly, Russia’s ability to operate forces with different degrees of deniability/officiality has lent it greater flexibility in managing allies, adversaries, and third-party actors.
In the 1970s, communities of the Kalinga sub-ethnic group in the Cordillera Mountains in northern Philippines successfully halted the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams along their main waterway, the Chico River, which would have caused their displacement. Based on interviews and archival research, the article examines the role played by a Kalinga political institution known as the bodong or peace pact in the Kalingas’ mobilisation against the dam project, using an analytical framework drawn from Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics.
The article examines Russian scholarly discussion of nonmilitary warfare with reference to securitization theory. Focusing on three main concepts of nonmilitary warfare that have featured in the Russian scholarly military and security debate in recent years – information war, color revolutions and hybrid war – it shows that Russian scholarly discussion of nonmilitary warfare, as it has evolved over time, has cast a widening range of phenomena as potential security threats, implying the need for an expanded state response to meet these threats. The broadened Russian understanding of security has some parallels in Western security discussions. However, a crucial distinction is that the Russian discussion has remained wedded to strong statist notion of security and a preponderant Western enemy image.
Russia’s poor military performance in the early stages of the full-scale war in Ukraine (2022-) has been attributed to various causes. This article considers possible intellectual causes of Russia’s poor performance. Reviewing public Russian military and security discussions on new wars in the years prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion, it argues that Russian operational planning on Ukraine aligned with key assumptions about new wars. In particular, the Russian leadership's failure to acknowledge Ukrainian agency, its misguided emphasis on non-kinetic means and its mistaken assumption that Western states would be unwilling to respond forcefully to Russian aggression followed key tenets of Russian new war thinking. The article raises questions about the relationship between Russian military theorizing and Russian military action, and how a prevailing intellectual paradigm shaped Russian perceptions about the reasonability of the invasion plan.
This study explores the role of mobile phones in livelihood creation among Syrian refugees in informal tented settlements in Akkar Governorate and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Drawing on forty-five interviews with Syrian refugees and ten interviews with aid workers, the study highlights the importance of mobile phones in reviving, maintaining and leveraging social capital for the purpose of securing livelihoods in a context of precarity and restricted movement. We find that mobile phones offer important means for reviving social networks in exile, managing supportive relationships that have been established in Lebanon and liaising with employers. As such, they constitute important tools for coping with a context shaped by legal exclusion, restricted movement, police harassment, decentralised aid provision and a geographical dispersal of support networks, even as they remain a costly investment with uncertain returns.
The Soviet collapse in the early 1990s left a security vacuum in Tajikistan, where the regime retained few instruments of coercion after Moscow’s rule melted away. One potential source of informal coercive power was Soviet-Afghan War veterans, or afgantsy, who were militarily trained and in many cases combat-experienced and represented what Charles Tilly has termed ‘violent specialists’. This article argues that organized afgantsy initially offered security functions to the Tajik regime but that, as state authority crumbled, their relationship to state bodies became increasingly tenuous. Eventually, many veterans aligned with non-state violent actors during the civil war, performing several coercive functions on their behalf, including establishing, training, and commanding armed formations. The trajectory of the veterans, hence, paralleled that of the state collapse and the informalization of coercive power in Tajikistan. The changing relationship between veterans and political authority offers a point on which to explore wider shifts in the control and deployment of coercive power in the context of the Soviet collapse in Tajikistan.
How is it possible to gain a sense that you have a voice and that your life matters when you have lost everything and live your life as a ‘displaced person’ in extreme precarity? We explore this question by examining the mundane everyday organizing practices of Syrian refugees living in tented settlements in Lebanon. Contrasting traditional empirical settings within organization studies where an already placed and mattering subject can be assumed, our context provides an opportunity to reveal how relations of recognition and mattering become constituted, and how subjects in precarious settings become enacted as such. Specifically, drawing on theories on the relational enactment of self and other, we show how material-discursive boundary-making and invitational practices – organizing a home, cooking and eating, and organizing a digital ‘home’ – function to enact relational host/guest subject positions. We also disclose how these guest/host relationalities create the conditions of possibility for the enactment of a subject that matters, and for the despair enacted in everyday precarious life to transform into ‘undefeated despair’.
This article compares the use of maskirovka (the Soviet and Russian art of deception) in two Moscow-led military operations: the seizure of Kabul in 1979 and the occupation of Crimea in 2014. It does so using a framework derived from Barton Whaley’s writings on military de-ception, which offers a useful heuristic for cross-space and cross-time comparisons. The aim is to contribute empirically to the broader discussion about continuity and change in Russianwarfare since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The article argues that deception was used in both operations to support the military seizure of territory. That is to say, it was not used to bring about a system collapse through non-military means in the Crimea; rather, deception was an auxiliary to military action in both operations. The main observed difference between the two cases consisted in the more gradual and composite use of deceptive measures in the Crimea compared to in Afghanistan. In the Crimea, Russia was able to maintain an aura of uncertainty around its intent and the presence of its troops even as information about the reality of the situation began to filter through. In Afghanistan, the mask of deception all but vanished when it became known that the forces attacking the Taj Beg palace were Soviet.
The article discusses visions of future warfare articulated in recent Russian military publications. There seems to be agreement among Russian scholars that future war will be triggered by Western attempts to promote Western political and economic interests while holding back Russia's resurgence as a global power. The future war with the West is viewed as inevitable in one form or another, whether it is subversion and local wars or large-scale conventional war. While the danger of conventional war has declined, according to several scholars, the West is understood to have a wide range of non-kinetic means at its disposal that threaten Russia. In order to withstand future dangers, Russia has to be able to meet a large number of kinetic and non-kinetic threats at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]