Auxiliary Armed Forces and Innovations in Security Governance in Mozambique’s Civil War

Abstract

Who rules during the civil war? This article argues that the concept of armed group governance must be expanded to include auxiliary armed forces linked to rebels or the government. Comparing the organization of rebel and government auxiliaries, the article demonstrates that security governance during war is never static, but evolves over time. Evidence from the civil war in Mozambique (1976Mozambique ( -1992 shows that the auxiliary's origin shapes its initial level of autonomy. Second, auxiliary contribution to battlefield success of one side may induce innovations adopted by auxiliaries on the other. Both have distinct consequences for the nature of governance.

Civil war and the non‐linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

“…In order to make sense of this particular chronocratic (Kirtsoglou & Simpson 2020) configuration in Mozambique, the relations between chronos and aion (despite its future orientation) and the calls to fundamentally rethink the nature of the political subject, by Deleuze, Mbembe, and Scott, respectively, are all helpful. At one level, the current violence in Mozambique, naturally, reflects the failure of reconciliation in a technical sense, including failed integration of Renamo fighters into the military and the configuration of the one-party state (Bueno 2019;Jentzsch 2022;Wiegink 2019). At a more fundamental level, however, while identifying such dimensions is key, I believe the ethnographic material indicates the impossibility of even thinking forms of reconciliation without a future.…”

“…11The author acknowledges that the existence of several other armed forces fundamentally problematizes the Renamo‐Frelimo/Mozambican government distinction, including the rebellion in Zambézia Province pre‐dating the establishment of Renamo (Morier‐Genoud et al . 2018) and the so‐called traditional army of Naparama (Jentzsch 2017, 2022). While recognizing these complications, I will nonetheless here deal with the Renamo‐Frelimo/Mozambican government distinction as these remained the sole parties integral to the peace process and are also those that continue to inform the political and historical horizons of my interlocutors (but see Sumich & Bertelsen 2021).…”

Delegation, Sponsorship, and Autonomy: An Integrated Framework for Understanding Armed Group–State Relationships

“…Militias' roles may adapt over time, depending on their own interests and the types of threats states face (Ahram 2011;Carey and Mitchell 2017;Dirkx 2017;Salehyan 2020). Pro-government militias are sometimes formed by the state, but they may also develop autonomously as community defense forces, and then be brought into a delegation relationship (Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015;Böhmelt and Clayton 2018;Salehyan 2020), as occurred with the Naparama movement in Mozambique (Jentzsch 2017). Or militias may be the forces of criminal organizations, collaborating with state actors and political parties to gain resources and protection from law enforcement, whether in exchange for controlling territory and fighting against rival criminal organizations (see Barnes 2017) or for turning out votes in contexts such as urban Brazil and Jamaica (Leslie 2010;Bullock 2019).…”