Influential armed groups continue to confound policymakers, diplomats, and analysts decades after their transformational arrival on the scene in the Middle East and North Africa. The most effective of these militias can most usefully be understood as hybrid actors, which simultaneously work through, with, and against the state. This joint report from The Century Foundation identifies the factors that make some hybrid actors persistent and successful, as measured by longevity, influence, and ability to project power militarily as well as politically. It finds that three factors correlate most closely with impact: constituent loyalty, resilient state relationships, and coherent ideology. The authors of this report examined cases in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, drawing on years of fieldwork, to distinguish hybrid actors, classic nonstate proxies, and aspirants to statehood--all of which merit different analytical and policy treatment. The report demonstrates the ways that groups can shift along a spectrum as they adapt to changing conditions.

Re-Purposing Suzuki: A Hybrid Approach to Actor Training introduces a system of text analysis that synthesizes physical, psychological, and vocal components in order to truthfully embody heightened texts and contexts. By understanding how the author has re-purposed Suzuki and other physical training methods, as well as Stanislavski, readers will gain an awareness of how to analyze a particular training method by extrapolating its key components and integrating it into a holistic, embodied approach to text analysis. The book explores a method of physical scoring via Rules of the Body and Rules of Composition, as well as a method of approaching heightened texts from Greek drama to post-modern playwrights that draws on the individual actor’s imagination and experience and integrates voice, mind, and body. Readers will be able to either replicate this approach, or apply the logic of its building blocks to assemble their own personal creative process applicable to a variety of performance genres. This is a source book for actors, theatre students, practitioners, and educators interested in assembling tools derived from different sources to create alternative approaches to actor training. While the process outlined in the book evolves in a classroom setting, the components of the pedagogy can also be practiced by individuals who are interested in finding new ways to explore text and character and bring them into their own personal practice.

Humankind has always sought out innovative and new ways of waging war, establishing new forms of warfare. Set against a background of global strategic instability this process of innovation has, over the last two decades, produced a new and complex phenomenon, hybrid warfare. Distinct from other forms of modern warfare in several key aspects, it presents a unique challenge that appears to baffle policymakers and security experts, while giving the actors that employ it a new way of achieving their goals in the face of long-standing Western conventional, doctrinal, and strategic superiority. The Hybrid Age analyses the phenomenon of hybrid warfare through theoretical frameworks and a range global case studies from the 2006 Lebanon War to the Russian intervention in Ukraine in 2014. This book aims to establish a unified theory of hybrid warfare, which not only outlines what the term means, but also places it in its context, and provides the tools which enable an observer to identify and react to a future instance of hybrid warfare.

Recognition is often considered a means to de-escalate conflicts and promote peaceful social interactions. This volume explores the forms that social recognition and its withholding may take in asymmetric armed conflicts, examining the risks and opportunities that arise when local, state, and transnational actors recognise, misrecognise, or deny recognition of armed non-state actors. By studying key asymmetric conflicts through the prism of recognition, it offers an innovative perspective on the interactions between armed non-state actors and state actors. In what contexts does granting recognition to armed non-state actors foster conflict transformation? What happens when governments withhold recognition or label armed non-state actors in ways they perceive as misrecognition? The authors examine the ambivalence of recognition processes in violent conflicts and their sometimes-unintended consequences. The volume shows that, while non-recognition prevents conflict transformation, the recognition of armed non-state actors may produce counterproductive precedents and new modes of exclusion in intra-state and transnational politics.

This book sheds new light on the security challenges for failed states posed by violent non-state armed actors (VNSAs). By focusing on the Syrian Civil War, it explores the characteristics, ideologies and strategies of the Islamic State (ISIS) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG), as well as the regional and geopolitical impacts of these VNSAs. The contributors also cover topics such as the re-imagination of borders, the YPG’s demands for national sovereignty, and the involvement of regional and global powers in the Syrian crisis. “This timely volume by regional scholars and experts examines various aspects of the emergence and expansion of violent non-state actors in the Syrian/Iraqi conflict. The wealth of detail and approaches enhance our understanding of the transformation and dynamics of contemporary conflicts within and beyond the region.” Keith Krause, The Graduate Institute, Geneva “This book opens fascinating glimpses into contrasting forms of “state-like” governance established by non-state actors, ISIS and the Kurdish PYD. [...] It is an important source for students of the Syrian conflict, civil wars, failed states and hybrid governance.”Raymond Hinnebusch, Director Centre for Syrian Studies, University of St. Andrews “This book is an excellent resource for those looking for an interdisciplinary account of VNSAs during the Syrian civil war. It makes a nice contribution to the study of violent non state actors and poses a set of new and pressing questions.” Max Abrahms, Northeastern University.

Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.

This collection brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring how development financing and interventions are being shaped by a wider and more complex platform of actors than usually considered in the existing literature. The contributors also trace a changing set of key relations and alliances in development – those between business and consumers; NGOs and celebrities; philanthropic organizations and the state; diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites and productive capitalists; and between ‘new donors’ and developing country governments. Despite the diversity of these actors and alliances, several commonalities arise: they are often based on hybrid transnationalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility; rather than being new per se, they are newly being studied as engaging in practices that are now coming to be understood as ‘development’; and they are limited in their ability to act as agents of development by their lack of accountability or pro-poor commitment. The articles in this collection point to images and representations as increasingly important in development ‘branding’ and suggest fruitful new ground for critical development studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.