Non-State Challenges in a Re-Ordered World: The Jackals of Westphalia.

• Author: Ogur, Berkan
• Position: Book review

The world felt the shock of various types of non-state actors (NSAs) such as the ETA, IRA and PKK, with their ethnic, separatist, leftist ideology, as they carried out terrorist attacks against nation-states in Europe and beyond in the 1970s and 1980s. However, recently, NSAs exerting regional and global influence and coming from underdeveloped regions like the Middle East and Central Africa have become widespread. It is a fact that NSAs follow diverse ideologies. In some cases, their ideologies are antagonistic to each other, but they have common patterns: they act as an alternative forms of hegemonic power that ideologically, geographically, and economically agitate and expostulate against states, which have been the legal and legitimate forms of hegemonic power since the constitution of the Westphalian system.

NSAs are not new phenomena; they come in various types and have a history as old as that of national states. Moreover, the history of states has contains an abundance of events involving non-state insurgents since the dawn of the Westphalian system. NSAs exist in developed countries as well as undeveloped countries and they economically and ideologically resist and oppose states. Although the term NSA is mostly used to refer to illegal political organizations and/or terrorists organizations, some NSAs are legal organizations such as private companies that aspire to influence the domestic and foreign policies of states for their own interests. Non-State Challenges in a Re-Ordered World, edited by Stefano Ruzza, Anja R Jakobi and Charles Geisler, presents NSAs' impact on various regions and examines the ways in which, despite little attention by mainstream media, they nonetheless manage to undermine state legitimacy as well as popular political organizations.

The book has three parts and thirteen chapters including an Introduction and Conclusion. Each part has several articles that emphasize different political notions and geographies. The introduction, written by Stefano Ruzza and Charles Geisler, first speaks about the evolution of the concept of the Westphalian system, then focuses on the legitimate tools of states by utilizing the writings of Weber, Hobbes, Tilly etc. The authors indicate that states take their power from their legitimacy, which also condones for them the use of violence. On the other hand, the main goal of an NSA is to undermine state legitimacy and to transform the weaknesses of the states into seedbeds for...