5 November 2020

Congrats to N+N Porticus Fellow Spyridon Tsoutsoumpis for his latest publications: The Lords of War: violence, governance and nation-building in north-western Greece, published in European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire.

The article explores the intersection between paramilitary mobilization and nation-building in the area of Thesprotia in north-western Greece. It does so by examining the activities of the right-wing paramilitaries of EDES (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Sindesmos – National Republican Greek League) between the Axis occupation and the early Cold War period. Studies of nation-building in twentieth-century Europe have adopted a state-centric approach. More recent scholarship has questioned this approach and presented a more nuanced picture of the nation-making process. A significant strand of this scholarship discusses the role of non-state armed actors – bandits, paramilitaries and criminal gangs – in this process. The present article contributes to this literature by focusing on an aspect of paramilitarism that has largely been overlooked in the existing scholarship: governance. The article discusses patterns of paramilitary governance and explores the impact of wartime rule in local institutions and civilian security, as well as the political legacies of paramilitarism.

Read more at tandfonline.com.