Category: blog

This post, on Thorin Oakenshield’s counter-Smaug insurgency, was originally published at Grand Blog Tarkin, a poliscifi blog.

“Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!,” bellows the Dragon, as the nimble-footed Hobbit scampers from his gold-bedecked lair. So begins Bilbo’s brief encounter with Smaug, the scourge of Dwarvish civilization. According to Tolkien’s legendarium, Dragons have maintained a mixed relationship with Sauron’s dark powers, reflecting a diversity of motives for inter-civilizational violence. Smaug’s seizure of Thror’s Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, stems from opportunistic banditry, as distinct from his successors’ annihilationism. Smaug’s intentions, however, have little impact on the scale of his invasion, which terrorized Erebor’s Dwarvish inhabitants, as well as the Men of Esgaroth, the valley’s township. For one-hundred and fifty years, Smaug slept, and napped, and dozed, and every-so-often, preened himself on his kleptomania.

As compelling as Peter Jackson’s computer-generated dragoneering may be, Tolkien’s death of Smaug is, by all readings, a marginal event. Bilbo’s intelligence-gathering effort, mentioned above, is operationally successful, revealing the Dragon’s physical vulnerabilities. Smaug seeks vengeance against the Men of Dale, whom the Dragon casts as disruptive Quislings. In an unusual occurrence in Middle Earth warfare, Smaug’s assault is a limited engagement, as Bard the Bowman pierced the Dragon’s underbelly. Of course, Bard’s defense of Dale permits limited relief; soon after Smaug’s death, an Orc horde swarms Erebor, prompting the Battle of Five Armies. If Smaug’s death bore local relevance, the impact of the Battle of Five Armies was cataclysmic. According to Tolkien’s narration, the Elves, Men, and Dwarves vanquished more than three-quarters of the North’s Orc population, a decisive victory. The counter-Orc coalition’s warfighting logic transforms a century of Middle Earth’s geopolitics, as Jon Jeckell’s survey of the War of the Ring details.

Tolkien’s sprawling, grand-strategic analysis of the Battle of Five Armies overshadows a micro-perspective towards discreet violence. Tolkien’s Hobbit, the Five Armies’ chronicle, is quick to highlight the post-Five Armies unity of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, forged against the Orcs’ assault. The counter-Orc coalition equitably distributes Erebor’s spoils, recaptured from the Dragon’s lair. The successful conclusion of the Battle of the Five Armies reaffirms the existence of a “free peoples of Middle Earth,” an infrequent conglomeration of Elves, Men, and Dwarves. If we backtrack, however, corrosive, if justified resource squabbles comprise the aftermath of Smaug’s demise, a marked contrast to the triumphant, trans-civilization harmony of the post-Five Armies scene. Throughout the Quest of Erebor, Thorin’s Dwarvish company lays claim to both their mining kingdom and its riches. The Dwarves’ hereditary authority bears little relevance to the Men of Dale, who request a compensatory share of Erebor’s gold, due to the Dragon’s rampant, wanton destruction of Esgaroth. When Thorin rejects Bard’s claim, the Lake-men lay siege to Erebor, requesting assistance from Thranduil’s Wood-Elves. While Tolkien introduces the subsequent scuffle as a prelude to the Battle of Five Armies, the siege of Erebor is likely more revealing of the counter-Smaug insurgency’s internal politics.

Tolkien describes the fragmentation of the counter-Smaug insurgency as a moral failure: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,” laments Thorin, following the Battle of Five Armies. In this way, Tolkien occupies a stark posture towards the civil conflict literature: greed, rather than grievance, drives Middle Earth’s violence. As Michael Ross conveys, the early civil conflict literature’s greed/grievance dichotomy is dated, both in its underemphasis on the particularism of resource types, as well as how violent organizations manipulate illicit economies. While gold’s influence is apparently significant, the counter-Smaug insurgency’s organizational structure may prove more significant, in keeping with recent scholarship on the “organization of rebellion.”

The Dwarvish company–Thorin Oakenshield, Gloin, Oin, Ori, Nori, Dori, Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur–is a familial organization, crafted in accordance with a broad edition of Thorin’s family tree. From a non-fantastical perspective, we can draw parallels to a criminal mafia, which often relies on hereditary networks to distribute resources, facilitate violence, and shape strategic decision-making. Thorin’s Dwarves create a formative nucleus of the counter-Smaug insurgency, which in its initial form maintains dual objectives: Smaug’s eradication, and the seizure of Erebor’s riches. As Bilbo burglars Smaug’s lair, the Dwarves form a temporary, informal coalition with Bard’s Lake-men, who possess the manpower with which to vanquish Smaug. The insurgency organization, however, lacks an “overlapping social base,” which Paul Staniland describes as a prerequisite for cohesive politics–the partnership relies on rent-seeking opportunism, rather than a communal logic. As the organization’s decentralization mounts, the incoherence of the insurgency’s political organization gives way to its second objective, prompting infighting and internal fragmentation.

In keeping with Tolkien’s moralistic standpoint, Bilbo’s crafty extraction of the Arkenstone, the crown-jewel of Erebor’s cache, allows Middle Earth’s free peoples to reach a negotiated settlement. Consistent with BlogTarkin’s recent tack towards alt-history, further poliscifi researchers may find it useful to conceptualize alternative trajectories of the counter-Smaug insurgency’s internal conflict mitigation.

When I last assessed Community‘s civil war, that post was also an elaborate effort to avoid an assortment of homework assignments. Twoscore and one week later, the stakes are higher, but the analytic appeal of Troy and Abed’s fratricidal violence remains unshakeable. In rapt anticipation of next week’s Community relaunch, I recently revisited my “Pillows and Blankets”-inspired guide to mass atrocity mitigation. In the course of my brief reconsideration, I noticed–to my fond surprise–that a fellow Redditor had approvingly re-upped the post, provoking a brief, if useful discussion on its analytic shortcomings. While Ennil, the commenting Redditor, +1’ed my analysis, he questioned my dearth of detail on the contributions of “external actors.” As Securing Rights readers may have observed, I’ve recently approached comparative political and foreign policy analysis from various indirect standpoints, including American history, science fiction, and popular culture. To the extent that Ennil’s critique allows me to continue this trend, and given the timeliness of the cultural reference, I’d like to offer a brief reassessment of Community‘s external conflict drivers.

Indeed, although my initial post highlighted an iterative relationship between local and international conflict dynamics, I reduced my analysis of external drivers to a brief aside on “conflict entrepreneurs,” seeking to emphasize localized drivers. As Jason Stearns has observed in the context of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this analytic inclination is all-too-frequent among conflict watchers, who for various reasons view particular conflict components as more or less responsible for violence than others. Where Community is concerned, I prioritized the localized elements of the Pillowtown/Blanketsburg conflict, likely in an effort to simplify the war’s didactic purpose. On first view, a localized analysis is not hard to achieve, and bears out in an anthropological survey of both Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian institutions, networks, and collective cultures. The Burnsian narrator conveys the existence of norms of military combat, which prove locally insalient: “rules are agreed upon, but casualties are inevitable,” he says, detailing Pierce’s unfettered melee during the Battle of Big Bulletin Board, after which the Show’s Worst Character experiences an “inaugural” case of erectile dysfunction. And, as I mentioned in the initial post, battles’ causes and drivers appear localized, oriented around the protection of particular pillow/blanket fort segments, rather than a supralocal structure (the blanket-state, as Troy might describe it).

A revised perspective on the Community civil war, however, bolsters a pluralistic interpretation of political violence, one which acknowledges the varied and dynamic salience of local, national, and international factors in facilitating and driving conflict. In my initial post, I described Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian identities as “contested, yet transient,” whatever that means. At any rate, my initial interpretation cast the divided societies’ communal identities as intensely localized, dismissing supralocal networks’ political relevance. On second glance, this analysis does not hold, and I’d like to apologize to those for whom Pillowtownianism and Blanketsburgianism are historically, personally, and culturally salient. In reality, “Pillowtownian” and “Blanketsburgian,” like “Union” and “Confederate,” are both positive and negative constructs–that is, each identity is defined by what it is (positive), as well as by what it is not. To be Pillowtownian is, as Abed would say, to embrace the true meaning of “pillowness,” while Troy’s “blanketness” possesses its own, internally coherent cultural, social, and political characteristics. Pillowtownianism’s existence, however, is also explicitly contingent on the genesis of Blanketsburgianism: according to the Burnsian narrator, Pillowtown, née New Fluffytown, emerges as a political institution only after Blanketsburg’s secession. For comparative perspective, consider James McPherson’s linguistic analysis of the Civil War’s impact on American identity: “Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were generally used as a plural noun: ‘the United States are a republic.’ After 1865 the United States became a singular noun.” Extracting localized identities from their supralocal context, therefore, diminishes their political meaning.

In addition to their social efforts, the political contributions of external actors are also difficult to pin down. Much due to Human Rights First’s research,  policy and non-governmental actors over the past half-decade have exhibited a mounting interest in mass-atrocity enablers. As the term “external actors” implies, analysts often view “enablers” as ambiguous third parties, operating at a calculated distance from violent conflict. Community‘s civil war reveals a flip-side to this analysis, one which, in evading definitional certainty, bears important considerations for conflict mitigation. In contrast to my initial assessment, in which “conflict entrepreneurs,” the Dean’s Guinness World Record aspirations, and mercenary networks play a marginal role, the external involvement of conflict third-parties varies, often dynamically, between embedded engagement and cautious detachment.

In my initial post, I referenced Chang’s Changlorious Basterds as a “pubescent group of rag-tag mercenaries,” using “mercenary” as a pejorative, rather than analytic term. On second glance, Jeff’s mercenary role is more revealing of the political dynamism of external actors. Vadim Volkov uses “violent entrepreneurship” to refer to Russia’s post-Soviet criminal networks, which filled political, social, and economic space made vulnerable by the Russian state’s institutional absence. However, as the Pillowtown/Blanketsburg war indicates, “violent entrepreneurship” also conveys an interaction between international material networks, national opportunists, and local perpetrators of political violence, each of whom wield conflict as a means towards political and social control. Jeff, for all intents and purposes, is an entrepreneur of violence, inciting both Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian forces in a cynical, elaborate truancy effort. Prior to the “Pillows and Blankets” episode, John Goodman’s Vice Dean Laybourne, who seeks Troy’s air-conditioning repair talents, is the ultimate violent entrepreneur (a less-poetic variation on Ice-T’s Original Gangster), as he exploits Troy and Abed’s pillow/blanket dissonance for his building-maintenance ends. Jeff and the Vice Dean’s diverse conflict engagements underline a typology of violent entrepreneurship, through which conflict’s local, national, and international levels interact.

Also, no one likes Britta.

As Alex Bellamy observes in a recent post, the human rights abuses of Mali’s myriad insurgencies highlight the role of mass violence in rebel military strategy. Mass atrocities often–in fact, overwhelmingly–occur alongside the violent give-and-take of insurgent and counterinsurgent forces, due to the insurgency’s inextricable reliance on civilian intelligence, resources, and sustenance. According to Bellamy, two factors drive rebel atrocities: the context in which violent conflict occurs, and the rebel movement’s ideological predisposition towards violence. Contemporary case studies–Central Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s M23 insurgency, or unrestrained factions of Syria’s opposition forces, for example–bely these micro-level functions of mass atrocities in rebel mobilization. In keeping with my American-history-as-political-science experiment, however, I find it useful to turn to a home-front case study, a mere four hundred miles from my Georgetown abode.

The 18 January 1863 Shelton Laurel massacre, which took place in North Carolina’s mountainous Madison County, is a minor, if well-documented historical snippet of the American civil war. Where the massacre graces the historical record, historians often describe the event as a representative counterpoint to conventional depictions of the American civil war as, well, conventional. Indeed, the massacre took place several counties away from the  center of Union/Confederate exchange; with the Emancipation Proclamation seventeen days prior, and the Battle of Chancellorsville a couple of months away, the Shelton Laurel massacre is something of a sideshow. The exceptional cases, however, often yield the most compelling reflections on micro-dynamics in civil conflict.

According to Rick Beard‘s recent Disunion post on the Shelton Laurel incident, Madison County was ripe for political violence: in 1861, the county boasted a Unionist delegate to North Carolina’s secession convention. Confederate military authorities viewed the county’s infantrymen with suspicion, as North Carolina was known for its disproportionate population of deserters. By the middle of the conflict, in late 1862, restricted flows of food and supplies left Madison County civilians to face widespread scarcities. Salt-provision gaps were particularly acute, little improved by Confederate soldiers’ persistent search for Union sympathizers. These scarcities prompted local civilians, many in fact harboring Union sympathies, to develop small guerrilla forces, which conducted salt raids against Confederate supply stores. In early January 1863, the 64th North Carolina Infantry’s Lawrence Allen and James Keith, stationed in eastern Tennessee, received approval to march on Laurel, North Carolina, with the express purpose of holding the Unionist guerrillas accountable for their salt raids.

By the time Lawrence Allen and James Keith’s counter-guerrilla force reached Laurel, the majority of the salt raiders had fled, according to eyewitness accounts. Instead, the 64th Infantry picked up a small contingent of thirteen civilians. After unsuccessfully torturing Laurel residents for actionable intelligence, Allen and Keith marched the thirteen civilians to the town’s outskirts, proceeding to shoot each, including youths, at point-blank. Despite efforts to hold Keith, in particular, accountable for his role in the massacre, the Confederate lieutenant general managed to skirt extended imprisonment until President Johnson’s 1868 general amnesty.

The Shelton Laurel massacre is a useful case study in evaluating Bellamy’s analysis of rebel motivations for mass violence. To convey the illegitimacy of the South’s secession, Unionists often referred to Confederate forces as the “rebels.” As a Yankee, I’m admittedly sympathetic to this perspective, but it also carries a modicum of historical truth. Matt Dickenson’s recent post on “moonshine and state-building” in the postbellum Mountain South indicates as much: prior to the expansion of the Reconstruction-era Revenue Service, informal institutions, rather than state authority, were the predominant mode of political organization in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. To describe the Confederacy’s Shelton Laurel counter-guerrilla efforts as a contested interaction between sub-state actors, then, is not entirely off the mark.

In keeping with Bellamy’s analysis, the Shelton Laurel case palpably demonstrates conflict contexts’ importance in shaping in the severity and scope of mass violence. Lawrence Allen and James Keith were local boys, so to speak–their hometown, Marshall, was the most prominent site of the Unionist guerrillas’ salt raids. Acknowledging the likely non-cooperation of local residents, Allen and Keith chose to extract intelligence through gruesome force. The Confederate officers’ violence was, in a sense, performative–that is, the officers indirectly displayed accountability for Unionist salt raids, rather than seeking it directly. Given the region’s Unionist sympathies, and the deep-seated class divisions that framed them, the 64th Infantry could expect little more than mass violence to be effective in controlling the population. Context mattered, and framed the 64th Infantry’s strategic environment.

As the Shelton Laurel case demonstrates, ideology is a necessary, but insufficient component of mass violence. Bellamy cites dehumanization, in-group/out-group designation, and scapegoating as representative forms of atrocities ideology. According to Drew Gilpin Faust’s cultural history of death during the American civil war, however, each ideological form was ubiquitous throughout the American civil war, regardless of civilian atrocity environment. Wartime correspondence offers anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: in several circumstances, Civil War soldiers conducted American “Indian war dances,” donned “Indian-style” war paint, and imitated war whoops, casting themselves as elated savages amid the battlefield melee. These acts show Bellamy’s dehumanization as a common quality of warfighting in Civil War soldiers’ perceptions of both themselves and their military opponents. Lawrence Allen and James Keith may have harbored resentment towards the Shelton Laurel Valley’s Unionist population, but their violence was opportunistic, rather than ideological.

I saw Django Unchained last week. For those who haven’t monitored the vibrant cultural conversation on Quentin Tarantino’s posture towards slavery’s historiography, it’s worth following–Tarantino’s portrayal of U.S. race relations is intentionally provocative, and contributes to an important, if underrepresented body of cinema on slavery, resistance, and the antebellum South’s infrastructure of oppression. If slavery’s racial overtones are Tarantino’s primary theme, the commercialization of violence is a close second. Django‘s “companion Western” narrates the exploits of Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz, a German-American bounty hunter, and Jamie Foxx’s Django, a freed slave and Dr. Schultz’s companion. In a revealing bit, Schultz explains bounty-hunting to an uninitiated Django: “Bounty hunting is like slavery, it’s a cash for flesh business.” In Tarantino’s antebellum landscape, violence is a private good*: in the absence of state institutions, a commercial logic determines who dies, who kills, and where slavery is concerned, who gets purchased. Where public bureaucracies exist–the U.S. Marshals, the public magistrate, the Records Office–they reinforce varied forms of commercial violence, including bounty-hunting and slavery, rather than mitigating them.

As Ryan Evans observes in his Tillyian analysis of state-building and organized crime in AMC’s Hell on Wheels, commercialized violence was an endemic characteristic of U.S. state-building throughout the nineteenth century. The securitization of the American state–that is, the transformation of violence from a private to a club good**–was a gradual process, which picked up in the aftermath of the Civil War. U.S. securitization had many causes, not the least of which was the entrenchment of law enforcement bureaucracies during the Civil War and postwar Reconstruction eras. While Johnson’s postwar administration modified Lincoln’s war-era taxes on whiskey, tobacco, and beer, successive Reconstruction governments relied on an expanded vice-tax bureaucracy to generate federal revenue. Where Democrats opposed most measures that expanded federal authority in the former Confederate states, Reconstruction-era Republicans supported the vast expansion of the revenue collection bureaucracy, often for the purposes of patronage. To ensure the forceable collection of federal vice taxes, often from armed distillery operations, civilian revenue officials rode alongside rag-tag posses. When Congress banned the use of posses in revenue collection operations, in 1879, U.S. soldiers filled the gap, blurring the distinction between military authority and law enforcement praxis.

If the Reconstruction-era South’s law-and-order activities comprised a gradual, if inconsistent creep towards public securitization, the American West was its historical foil. Take California, the historical center of commercial activity on the U.S. western seaboard. California’s popular historical debates on westward expansion are microcosms of contemporary race relations: bandidos, Mexican gangs who clashed with eastern settlers during the Gold Rush era, are a present-day symbol of both colonial resistance and of criminal violence, depending on who you ask. Bandido militias were early participants in the California Gold Rush, but arrived from Mexico, rather than the eastern United States. Their early affiliation with Mexican miners restricted their violence to American rancho raids. As retributive violence escalated, however, the bandidos’ violence proved increasingly opportunistic–Chinese labor communities were frequent targets. Bandido activity continued unfettered throughout the early 1850s. In 1853, acknowledging the bandidos’ security and commercial threat to California mining activity, the state legislature authorized the creation of the California Rangers.

Like their Texas counterparts of baseball lore, the California Rangers evade easy classification. Their central purpose was the violent elimination of Joaquin Morieta’s bandido militia, after which Ranger leader Harry Love disbanded the state-authorized militia. Despite their public authorization, the California Rangers were a privately-funded endeavor: their compensation came from the family of bandido victim Allen Ruddle, a California farmer. The reward allowed Mexican-American War veteran Harry Love to pull together a small militia of twenty Rangers, sourced from rural California’s community of experienced warfighters and frontiersmen. When Love presented decapitated Morieta’s head in Sacramento, the Ranger captain received a thousand-dollar reward. So, while California’s law enforcement community celebrates the Rangers as predecessors of the state’s policing enterprise, the Rangers do not conform to key characteristics of a public police force. Instead, the California Rangers’ origins more accurately cast the group as a prototypical private security contractor (PSC/PMC, in its military form).

PSC/PMC activity is among the most controversial characteristics of present-day international security. As Adam Elkus notes in his recent reflections on the Benghazi affair, the PSC/PMC “network of contractual relationships,” a legacy of the United States’ global reach, carries problematic consequences for U.S. foreign interests. The purpose of this post is not to probe these contractual relationships, but rather to assess the ways in which the historical United States, as a nascent state, used private security operations within its borders. As present-day states seek to expand the benefits of private security operations, while mitigating their negative consequences, the United States’ own state-building experience can be instructive. There are a number of important takeaways from the American frontier experience, but this one sticks out:

Just because institutions exist, that doesn’t mean they actually exist: The San Francisco Police Department was founded in 1849, the year before the U.S. government acknowledged California as its thirty-first state. The SFPD’s creation occurred during a first wave of growth in local law enforcement; the New York Police Department, where founding SFPD chief Malachi Fallon also served, was established in 1845. According to Roger McGrath, the early SFPD was incapable of stymying California’s early Gold Rush wave of organized crime, largely because of its proportionately limited human capital. McGrath describes an unruly scene, whereby “frustrated citizens, on several occasions, tried to take prisoners from the police and administer summary justice.” California’s law enforcement system only emerged as a (relatively) credible, effective policing body after a symbiotic, if competitive partnership with the Morse Detective Agency, a private firm.

That is to say, the privatization of security may be an undesirable outcome for a “consolidated” state, but, if the American experience is an applicable perspective, it’s likely integral to the state-building process.

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* Private good (excludable, rivalrous): under a commercial logic, a consumer must purchase an act of violence (a bounty, a slave’s price), an act which prevents others from consuming the same.

** Club good (excludable, non-rivalrous): under a club logic, a consumer must purchase an act of violence by a community institution (taxation, gang dues), an act which others can also consume.

Kelsey Atherton, who tweets at @AthertonKD, was kind enough to feature my debut on his excellent poliscifi group blog, Grand Blog Tarkin. Here’s the original link. For more SR analyses of international relations in pop culture, see here and here.

Pity the modern supervillain, Adam tells us. He’s a poor, decrepit figure, beholden to the deceptive whims of irrationality, distanced from the creative politics of his more practical predecessors. The grand image of global–or, better yet, multiversal–domination is a Mesopotamian artifact of superherodom.  The Joker’s low-tech banditry abounds in contemporary supervillainy, while Dalek “extermination” is little more than a charming, if impractical product of British public television. From a critical perspective, this shift is an unfortunate consequence of post-9/11 security cultures. If Judi Dench’s M is any indication–and s/he has been for a half-century–hero fandom should view the modern supervillain as a product of a more discreet Zeitgeist, of a less transparent, more opaque world of “shadows.” Hats off to Christopher Nolan, whose Joker is a mere interlude to Ra’s al-Ghul’s global League of Shadows, a happy marriage of Erik Prince (Bane, the mercenary) and young Emma Goldman (Talia al-Ghul, the vengeant anarchist terrorist spawn).

Superhero culture has a libertarian quality, which often interferes with an authentic understanding of state violence: indeed, the basic conceit of superherodom is the dominance of vigilante justice, which reigns over a bumbling state bureaucracy. State security forces are often incompetent, as in much of the Spiderman literature, or, even worse, hostile, as in the racially-tinged violence against the Marvel Universe’s mutant population. The Marvel Civil War is a partial exception: when the U.S. government passes the Superhuman Registration Act, the Marvel Universe’s superhero community engages in a destructive civil conflict, between the state-supported, military-industrial-complex-laden Iron Man faction and Captain America’s ideologically purist dissidents. Here, Marvel’s U.S. government is an obvious, if well-constructed commentary on the post-9/11 national security state, based on an impressionistic rendering of Bush-era counterterrorism policies.

When its constitutive agencies aren’t busy being goofy, the super-state is little more than a shell, which both superheroes and villains may evade with ease. J. Dana Stuster has artfully outlined the storyline of Batman Incorporated, a global network of batmen and batwomen that both combats global terror and bolsters regional crime-fighting. International legal approaches to transnational crime/crime-fighting control don’t fit easily alongside a KAPOW! onomatopeia, and so Batman Incorporated shirks the complicated question of state sovereignty. Similarly, both Nick Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D., an international intelligence organization, and the Avengers, at points a UN-mandated peacekeepingbody, are more reflective of the limits and possibilities of global governance than its domestic contexts. It’s difficult to trace the origins of superhero organizations’ global outlook, but one may assume that the nature of villainy plays a role: if the villain, be s/he Adolf Hitler or Loki, seeks global dominance, superheroes must rise to the challenge.

While contemporary supervillainy may fall short in its political logic, this shift has positive dividends in a more complex concept of the state’s response. Consider Nolan’s Bane: in The Dark Knight Rises, Alfred makes a brief reference to Bane’s mercenary participation in a “coup in West Africa that secured mining operations for our friend John Daggett.” Bane’s personality profile may be a pithy dig at West Africa’s regional instability. For the discerning Africa-watcher, however, it functions as a surprisingly prescient reference to the nature of disaggregated governance in coup-prone West African states. In the aftermath of Mali and Guinea-Bissau’s early 2012 coups, a trickle of research has demonstrated the corrosive influence of organized crime in both countries. As Ken Opalo has demonstrated, opportunistic cartel networks have taken advantage of Guinea-Bissau’s pervasive corruption, using the small, unstable country as a staging ground for Euro-African trafficking operations. In Mali, according to Wolfram Macher, illicit regional flows–in cocaine, cigarettes, and humans–have created a lucrative revenue base for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and steepened informal links between Malian officials and AQIM operatives. So, when Nolan describes Bane’s mercenary activity as a driver of instability in West Africa, he’s not totally off-base.

Bane’s nefarious West Africa affiliations reflect a particular type of governance, one which is not often in evidence in the incompetent bureaucracies of superhero yore: the “disaggregated state.” Anne-Marie Slaughter popularized the concept of disaggregated states in her book A New World Order, which described the international legal problem of governance networks–communities of policy practice that, despite their formal affiliation with state institutions, claim links to professional groups, advocacy organizations, and similar non-state actors. As with most things in international politics, disaggregated states have their underbellies: Dan and Adam have written at length (as if there’s any other kind of Dan-and-Adam writing) about the ways in which illicit networks and cartel organizations challenge the basic ontology of state-building. Jay Ulfelder has also expanded on this concept in his empirical critique of the Weberian state-building literature, which, being Weberian, emphasizes “ideal types” of violence prevention, eschewing an anthropological understanding of actual, human interactions with state institutions, bureaucracies, and networks.

Batman’s politics of the state are steeped in this literature, in a way that should be instructive for students of international politics. Consider Batman: Year One, Frank Miller’s widely-acclaimed 1987 reinterpretation of the Batman origin story. Year One introduces Batman as a literary foil to Jim Gordon, an upstart outsider who struggles to counter corruption in the Gotham City Police Department (GCPD). Gordon quickly confronts internal opposition from the criminal underworld’s GCPD allies, including Police Commissioner Gillian Loeb and his lieutenant Arnold John Flass. Corruption is hardly new to Gotham; the reader is hardly surprised when Flass benefits from a cocaine delivery operation. What’s notable, however, is the extent of paramilitary violence that follows GCPD’s corruption. Gordon describes Branden, a GCPD SWAT team leader and a recurrent Batman antagonist, as the head of a “lunatic gestapo,” which regularly massacres civilian protesters. Branden’s force indicates the extent of disaggregated state authority, which Gotham’s corrupt police department uses to both enforce and evade legal restrictions on its formal authority.

In further renderings of counter-villain violence, superhero enthusiasts would do well to consider the potential applications of Batman’s disaggregated state model. In the meantime, disaggregated state theory offers an importance lens through which we can understand supervillains’ violence, as well as the state’s all-too-frequent complicity in its occurrence.