Wolfram Lacher
Biographic Data
| ID | 3454170 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wolfram Lacher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wolfram |
| FAMILY NAME | Lacher |
| SIGNATURE | LACHER W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7301-7354 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
State Formation amid Fragmented Central Authority
Based on a comparative analysis of post-intervention Iraq and Libya, this article theorizes patterns common to both cases as state formation amid fragmented central authority. This concept is defined by the competition of rival political-military forces within state institutions, including through the use of violence. State formation proceeds through the accumulation of organizational power by competing forces and arrangements linking them to eac…
Le plus grand des maux
Research on civil wars has been thriving for three decades now, and an up-to-date monograph attempting a synthesis of this body of work has long been overdue. Gilles Dorronsoro’s Le plus grand des
Armed Group Consolidation
Libya
Violence and Social Transformation in Libya
How does civil war begin? The role of escalatory processes
Correlational and bargaining failure approaches to the eruption of civil war have neglected the role of escalatory processes, whose analysis has to date been largely limited to sociology. Escalating violence involves mechanisms that are self-reinforcing and have a propensity to transform the political landscape by reshaping group boundaries and political identities, and prompting the formation of new actors. This article shows that such mechanism…
Social Cleavages and Armed Group Consolidation
In Libya’s fragmented military landscape, Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces stands out as the only armed group that concentrated power over entire regions. The interplay of relative power and social cleavages conditioned Haftar’s choices of consolidation strategies. As Haftar grew stronger, he progressively moved from cooperative and competitive approaches toward coercion. Social cleavages wrought by conflict – as opposed to seemingly obj…
Le conflit libyen, creuset des réseaux régionaux
Réseaux des acteurs libyens en exil, réseaux des acteurs étrangers exilés en Libye : comme toutes les guerres, le conflit libyen fait émerger de nouveaux acteurs, de nouveaux groupes et de nouveaux liens sociaux. Cet article évalue les répercussions régionales de la crise libyenne à travers les réseaux sociaux qui se créent au gré des luttes de pouvoir en Libye. Si on mesure l’importance de ces réseaux transnationaux à l’aune de leur poids dans l…
Was Libya’s Collapse Predictable
The debate over whether the Libyan intervention was justified should take as its starting point the imponderables facing decision-makers in March 2011
Libya’s Local Elites and the Politics of Alliance Building
In post-revolutionary Libya, the collapse of central authority and the fragmentation of territorial control have produced a fundamental change in the political elite. Local elites emerged as the leading actors and held the key to whether central authority would be re-established. These local elites faced strategic choices in building alliances among themselves: they could seek to enter and back the central government; build an anti-government coa…
Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-Sahara Region
The Malian crisis and the challenge of regional security cooperation
The weakness of regional security cooperation has been a key factor in the gradual destabilization of the Sahel-Sahara region over the past decade. While organized crime, extremist activity, and cross-border movements of arms and fighters have strengthened linkages among non-state actors in the region, state policies have failed to keep up. With the escalation of the crisis in Mali, West African states have adopted an approach diverging strongly …
One hippopotamus and eight blind analysts
This is an exercise in contemporary history that aims to give a comprehensive background and analysis to the current (2012) political crisis in Mali, generated by the start of a new Tuareg nationalist uprising against the state, complemented by a coordinated attack on the state by both international (AQIM) and local Jihadi-Salafi movements, leading to a coup d'état against the incumbent President Touré, and finallly a political stalemate of great…
Actually Existing Security
The transformation of Saharan populations into an object of global security is analysed as a specific instance of security's expansion globally, as well as of its merger with development, understood as a side-effect of the former. It is shown that the search for threats in the Sahara, and the establishment of surveillance apparatuses, is a precondition for the detection and discursive production of these threats. Security, through its production …
Iraq
In the literature on post-conflict reconstruction, the intervention in Iraq has been understood as an exception to, if not an aberration from, contemporary state-building. This article argues that whether Iraq is an exception to, or the epitome of post-conflict reconstruction depends on the genealogy one attributes to the latter. Denying that Iraq is an exemplary instance of contemporary reconstruction means neglecting the continuities of state-b…
One hippopotamus and eight blind analysts
This is an exercise in contemporary history that aims to give a comprehensive background and analysis to the current (2012) political crisis in Mali, generated by the start of a new Tuareg nationalist uprising against the state, complemented by a coordinated attack on the state by both international (AQIM) and local Jihadi-Salafi movements, leading to a coup d'état against the incumbent President Touré, and finallly a political stalemate of great…
Libya’s Local Elites and the Politics of Alliance Building
In post-revolutionary Libya, the collapse of central authority and the fragmentation of territorial control have produced a fundamental change in the political elite. Local elites emerged as the leading actors and held the key to whether central authority would be re-established. These local elites faced strategic choices in building alliances among themselves: they could seek to enter and back the central government; build an anti-government coa…
The Malian crisis and the challenge of regional security cooperation
The weakness of regional security cooperation has been a key factor in the gradual destabilization of the Sahel-Sahara region over the past decade. While organized crime, extremist activity, and cross-border movements of arms and fighters have strengthened linkages among non-state actors in the region, state policies have failed to keep up. With the escalation of the crisis in Mali, West African states have adopted an approach diverging strongly …
Actually Existing Security
The transformation of Saharan populations into an object of global security is analysed as a specific instance of security's expansion globally, as well as of its merger with development, understood as a side-effect of the former. It is shown that the search for threats in the Sahara, and the establishment of surveillance apparatuses, is a precondition for the detection and discursive production of these threats. Security, through its production …
How does civil war begin? The role of escalatory processes
Correlational and bargaining failure approaches to the eruption of civil war have neglected the role of escalatory processes, whose analysis has to date been largely limited to sociology. Escalating violence involves mechanisms that are self-reinforcing and have a propensity to transform the political landscape by reshaping group boundaries and political identities, and prompting the formation of new actors. This article shows that such mechanism…
Social Cleavages and Armed Group Consolidation
In Libya’s fragmented military landscape, Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces stands out as the only armed group that concentrated power over entire regions. The interplay of relative power and social cleavages conditioned Haftar’s choices of consolidation strategies. As Haftar grew stronger, he progressively moved from cooperative and competitive approaches toward coercion. Social cleavages wrought by conflict – as opposed to seemingly obj…
Iraq
In the literature on post-conflict reconstruction, the intervention in Iraq has been understood as an exception to, if not an aberration from, contemporary state-building. This article argues that whether Iraq is an exception to, or the epitome of post-conflict reconstruction depends on the genealogy one attributes to the latter. Denying that Iraq is an exemplary instance of contemporary reconstruction means neglecting the continuities of state-b…
Le conflit libyen, creuset des réseaux régionaux
Réseaux des acteurs libyens en exil, réseaux des acteurs étrangers exilés en Libye : comme toutes les guerres, le conflit libyen fait émerger de nouveaux acteurs, de nouveaux groupes et de nouveaux liens sociaux. Cet article évalue les répercussions régionales de la crise libyenne à travers les réseaux sociaux qui se créent au gré des luttes de pouvoir en Libye. Si on mesure l’importance de ces réseaux transnationaux à l’aune de leur poids dans l…
Iraq
In the literature on post-conflict reconstruction, the intervention in Iraq has been understood as an exception to, if not an aberration from, contemporary state-building. This article argues that whether Iraq is an exception to, or the epitome of post-conflict reconstruction depends on the genealogy one attributes to the latter. Denying that Iraq is an exemplary instance of contemporary reconstruction means neglecting the continuities of state-b…
Actually Existing Security
The transformation of Saharan populations into an object of global security is analysed as a specific instance of security's expansion globally, as well as of its merger with development, understood as a side-effect of the former. It is shown that the search for threats in the Sahara, and the establishment of surveillance apparatuses, is a precondition for the detection and discursive production of these threats. Security, through its production …
Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-Sahara Region
The Malian crisis and the challenge of regional security cooperation
The weakness of regional security cooperation has been a key factor in the gradual destabilization of the Sahel-Sahara region over the past decade. While organized crime, extremist activity, and cross-border movements of arms and fighters have strengthened linkages among non-state actors in the region, state policies have failed to keep up. With the escalation of the crisis in Mali, West African states have adopted an approach diverging strongly …
One hippopotamus and eight blind analysts
This is an exercise in contemporary history that aims to give a comprehensive background and analysis to the current (2012) political crisis in Mali, generated by the start of a new Tuareg nationalist uprising against the state, complemented by a coordinated attack on the state by both international (AQIM) and local Jihadi-Salafi movements, leading to a coup d'état against the incumbent President Touré, and finallly a political stalemate of great…
Libya’s Local Elites and the Politics of Alliance Building
In post-revolutionary Libya, the collapse of central authority and the fragmentation of territorial control have produced a fundamental change in the political elite. Local elites emerged as the leading actors and held the key to whether central authority would be re-established. These local elites faced strategic choices in building alliances among themselves: they could seek to enter and back the central government; build an anti-government coa…
Was Libya’s Collapse Predictable
The debate over whether the Libyan intervention was justified should take as its starting point the imponderables facing decision-makers in March 2011
Le conflit libyen, creuset des réseaux régionaux
Réseaux des acteurs libyens en exil, réseaux des acteurs étrangers exilés en Libye : comme toutes les guerres, le conflit libyen fait émerger de nouveaux acteurs, de nouveaux groupes et de nouveaux liens sociaux. Cet article évalue les répercussions régionales de la crise libyenne à travers les réseaux sociaux qui se créent au gré des luttes de pouvoir en Libye. Si on mesure l’importance de ces réseaux transnationaux à l’aune de leur poids dans l…
Social Cleavages and Armed Group Consolidation
In Libya’s fragmented military landscape, Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces stands out as the only armed group that concentrated power over entire regions. The interplay of relative power and social cleavages conditioned Haftar’s choices of consolidation strategies. As Haftar grew stronger, he progressively moved from cooperative and competitive approaches toward coercion. Social cleavages wrought by conflict – as opposed to seemingly obj…
How does civil war begin? The role of escalatory processes
Correlational and bargaining failure approaches to the eruption of civil war have neglected the role of escalatory processes, whose analysis has to date been largely limited to sociology. Escalating violence involves mechanisms that are self-reinforcing and have a propensity to transform the political landscape by reshaping group boundaries and political identities, and prompting the formation of new actors. This article shows that such mechanism…
Violence and Social Transformation in Libya
Libya
State Formation amid Fragmented Central Authority
Based on a comparative analysis of post-intervention Iraq and Libya, this article theorizes patterns common to both cases as state formation amid fragmented central authority. This concept is defined by the competition of rival political-military forces within state institutions, including through the use of violence. State formation proceeds through the accumulation of organizational power by competing forces and arrangements linking them to eac…
Le plus grand des maux
Research on civil wars has been thriving for three decades now, and an up-to-date monograph attempting a synthesis of this body of work has long been overdue. Gilles Dorronsoro’s Le plus grand des
Armed Group Consolidation
Political science (11 works) · Law (7 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · African Studies and Geopolitics (6 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (4 works)