Who Were the Paramilitaries?

We have introduced three different conceptual approaches to the study of paramilitary violence in the 1940s and noted that the most prevalent, the Resistance-Collaboration Paradigm (RCP), is the least useful. Because the RCP places behaviour on a linear scale from ‘resistance’ at one pole to ‘collaboration’ on the other, it focuses only on those aspects of people’s lives that can be placed at some point on the continuum. In the case of armed resistance and collaboration, its focus is narrowly political. As a result, behaviour that went hand in hand with such resistance and collaboration, but does not fit into the paradigm, is either excluded or treated only in passing. For this reason, we are suggesting an alternative: the Regimes-of-Violence Paradigm (RVP), which is less deterministic, less prescriptive, and more holistic. The RVP allows us to consider violent behaviour, including armed resistance and collaboration, in its wider social context, and to construct a three-dimensional view of the people who engaged in that behaviour.