The project examines the origins, articulations and legacies of paramilitarism in the Greek New Lands during the era of the European civil war (1905-1949). The borderlands were the sight of fierce and persistent violence throughout this period. This violence has been examined through the prism of elite political and military actors. Accordingly, much of this scholarship is state- and nation-centric while the persistence of paramilitary violence is still seen as a local aberration that is unconnected to broader political and social developments in 20th century Europe. The project addresses this discrepancy by shifting the attention to the men and women who experienced and inflicted violence on the ground during this period. In doing so it offers a new angle of vision to analyse the ways in which paramilitary violence transformed the political and social worlds of the borderlands and produced new political subjectivities and orders through processes of violent mobilization, economic despoilation and illicit governance. The project therefore has a twofold rationale. First, it allows us to deprovincialize the study of paramilitary violence in the borderlands that has been often seen through a national lens by re-integrating it into a broader European and global story of warfare, state-making and state-breaking. At the same it provides a more succinct understanding of the origins and logic of the successive outbreaks of violence in the borderlands by exploring how imperial legacies, new mass ideologies (fascism, communism) and local cultures of violence interacted to produce new forms, dynamics, and imaginings of violence in the borderlands.

This approach problematizes monocausal, and state-centric exegeses that have dominated much of the extant scholarship thereby providing a more nuanced understanding of the motivations, and role of the local, and national actors involved in these processes. Historians have analysed the nation-building process in terms of a strong centre imposing its will on diverse peripheries. I instead suggest that the borderlands had a formative influence in the structures and policies of the central state. Paramilitary violence undermined established social and political practices while the formal economy was replaced by informal networks that depended on illicit activities such as smuggling, raiding and mercenary service. Paramilitaries thus became the foremost arbitrators of national affiliation and social mobility. Such practices did not lose their salience after the conflicts ceased. Political insecurity, institutional weakness and an anemic economy enabled these groups to refashion their role as mediators and brokers between the central state and the peasant population and retain their hold over the informal economy thus turning the warlords, paramilitary leaders and their affiliates into a new ruling elite, a ‘violent middle class’. Ultimately, the policies, political mentalities and processes associated with the central elites were in fact born in the borderlands among the violent actors first mobilized to expand and protect the state. This approach therefore revises and enhances our thinking on how the state and its institutions were made in modern Greece, the importance and role of violence in Greek society while also informing broader debates on post-colonial societies and nation-making.