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The authors would like to thank David Cunningham, Neil Mitchell, Ben Smith, and Scott Gates for their comments. The paper benefited from feedback at the 2011 annual meetings of the ISA and the APSA, and especially from input from colleagues at CSCW/PRIO. Finally, we would like to thank five anonymous reviewers and Jeffrey Isaac for their very helpful suggestions.
The authors are listed in alphabetical order.
When I came to Spain, and for some time afterwards, I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it. I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war ... As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names--PSUC, POUM, FAI, CNT, UGT, JCI, JSWU, AIT--they merely exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials ...
-- George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
Introduction
As Orwell discovered on arriving in Barcelona in the midst of the Spanish civil war, politics on the ground have a way of unsettling the categories that structure our understanding of conflicts. Rather than a united front against fascism, he found an alliance of competing socialist, communist, anarcho-syndicalist, and liberal parties and associated militias; Catalan, Basque, and Galician nationalists split across these ideological divides and between competing autonomist, separatist, and conservative political agendas and Catholic and anti-clerical tendencies; and an assortment of nationalities and ideological rivalries in the international brigades--and that was only the side of the Republican government. Though these sorts of internal divisions are fundamental to conflict dynamics, we frequently think of conflicts in terms of cohesive actors bound by the shared identities and interests of the groups they claim to represent: Chechens and Russians; Israelis and Palestinians; Iraq's Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities; Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka; and the National Transitional Council opposition and Gaddhafi loyalists in Libya. But "actorness" is seldom something we can take for granted in politics, especially in civil wars. One observes, for example, internecine fighting between Chechen factions, a Palestine divided between dominant Fatah and Hamas parties, rivalry between factions competing to represent Iraq's Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish communities, the role of pro-state Tamil paramilitaries...