Men of the Gun and Men of the State: Military Entrepreneurship in the Shadow of the Civil War

The article explores the intersection between paramilitary mobilization, criminal violence and nation-building during the Greek civil war. Nation-building has been described in terms of a centralized state extending its writ through a process of modernization of institutions and monopolization of violence. Accordingly, the presence and contribution of private actors has been seen as a sign of and a contributive factor to state-weakness. The article demonstrates a more nuanced image whereby nation-building was characterized by ‘pervasive accommodations between, and interlacing of, state and non-state violence’. This approach problematizes divisions between legal (state-sanctioned) and illegal (private) violence in the making of the modern nation state and sheds new light into the complex way in which the ‘men of the gun’ interacted with the ‘men of the state’ in this process and the way these alliances impacted the nation-building process in the local and national level.