Militias are an empirical phenomenon that has been overlooked by current research on civil war. Yet, it is a phenomenon that is crucial for understanding political violence, civil war, post-conflict politics, and authoritarianism. Militias or paramilitaries are armed groups that operate alongside regular security forces or work independently of the state to shield the local population from insurgents. We review existing uses of the term, explore the range of empirical manifestations of militias, and highlight recent findings, including those supplied by the articles in this special issue. We focus on areas where the recognition of the importance of militias challenges and complements current theories of civil war. We conclude by introducing a research agenda advocating the integrated study of militias and rebel groups.

Does violent repression strengthen the state? In this paper we explore the legacies of repression by the Mexican government on subsequent state consolidation. We investigate how a particular form of state repression, forced disappearances of alleged leftist dissidents, during the 1960s and 1970s in Mexico had path-dependent consequences for different dimensions of state capacity nearly fifty years later. To do so, we rely on data gathered from suppressed Mexican human rights reports of forced disappearances which, to our knowledge, have not been analyzed by social scientists before. Controlling for a rich set of pre-disappearances covariates, we find that forced disappearances are positively correlated with contemporary measures of fiscal and bureaucratic capacity. However, historical forced disappearances do not help the state to provide security, to consolidate its monopoly over the use of force, or to provide welfare-related public goods in the long run. Moreover, disappearances are negatively correlated with various measures of trust in the government.

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What informs ordinary citizens' attitudes toward the use of force? Previous research identifies several key concerns in public opinion toward war, but does not directly evaluate the relative importance of these considerations. We articulate three distinct logics of war support-moral, legal, and instrumental-and use an experimental survey with 3,000 U.S. respondents to test how ordinary citizens make trade-offs among multiple competing imperatives relevant for decision making in war. Our design is the first to isolate to what extent substantive legal demands, instrumental military imperatives, and specific moral principles are reflected in respondents' preferences. Although all logics have some resonance, we find that respondents' preferences are remarkably consistent with several core demands of international law even though respondents are not told that the legality of the use of force is at stake. Only the imperative to minimize U.S. military casualties overwhelms both legal and moral demands.