Introduction

Our world is becoming increasingly paramilitarised. As Paul Kan has noted: ‘Only a small fraction of the world’s population live in states that have highly professional and well-functioning militaries or police forces; people across most of the globe live under the power and influence of militias and other violent non-state groups’. Moreover, since 2009, there has been a significant and sustained increase in the scale of paramilitary violence. The most obvious examples of paramilitarism can be found in states that are afflicted by war and civil war, such as the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen. In the civil war in Syria after 2011, the government of Bashar al-Assad made extensive use of militias in its struggle against a range of insurgent paramilitary forces. In Ukraine, since 2014, paramilitaries and private armies of various kinds have fought both for and against the Russian invaders.