Whether in the Balkans, Afghanistan or the Arab Spring, pro-government militias have an important impact on conflict, on civilian well being and on the prospects for peace. The pro-government militia (PGM) project is jointly led by Sabine Carey and Neil Mitchell (University College London). It aims to increase our understanding of these groups and make their relationship to government more transparent.

An important part of the project is the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). The PGMD 2.0 codes information on pro-government militias for all countries from 1981 to 2014. We are currently working on updating the data up to 2020.

Dataset highlights:

  • Locates pro-government militias

  • Spans across the globe from 1981 to 2014

  • Identifies links between groups and governments

  • Codes a wide range group characteristics

  • Utilizes information from systematic searches of news sources and NGO reports, as well as from meta analyses of academic research.

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Access the Pro-Government Militias Database

Some patterns on Pro-Government Militias

The figure on the left shows what communities make up the pro-government militias, depending on whether the PGM was created by the government (bottom row) or not (top row). It shows that PGMs created top down from the government are predominantly local groups and often consist of non-civilians, i.e., specialists in violence such as (former) members of the formal security sector. PGMs not created by the government mobilize primarily along ethnic or religious lines.

These three figures show the number of PGMs across time (left panel) and number of countries with at least one PGM (right panel) we have coded in the PGMD 2.0, see Carey, Mitchell and Paula, 2022, “The Life, Death and Diversity of Pro-Government Militias”

Pro-government militias guidebook

The Pro-government militias guidebook provides easily summaries of the groups’ key characteristics. This encyclopaedia brings together information from the PGMD and systematic and structured search of relevant research and reports.

Pro-Government Militias during Counterinsurgency Wars, 1945-2005

This dataset contains all pro-government militia groups that fought in counterinsurgency wars between 1945 and 2005. Augmenting the existing PGMD, the new dataset offers systematic information on informal and semi-official militia groups actively involved in internal conflicts. It codes temporal information on the presence of these groups, their government links, and the primary recruitment pool of their members. 

This dataset is used in the publication: Carey, Sabine C., Neil J. Mitchell, and Adam Scharpf. 2016. “Pro-government militias and conflict” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Last modified February 24, 2022. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.33 [Dataset]

Typology of pro-government militias

Sabine Carey & Neil Mitchell. 2017. "Pro-government militias." Annual Review of Political Science 20: 127-147.

In this paper we develop a typology based on the link of the pro-government militia to the state and to society as a device to capture variations among these groups. We use the typology to explore insights from this emerging literature on the causes, consequences, and puzzling survival of pro-government militias, their implications for security and human rights, and to generate open questions for further research.