Collaboration in Authoritarian and Armed Conflict Settings

Who is the collaborator, or in whose eyes? What is the motivation to collaborate: for material gain, for ideology, for duty? When is collaboration betraying a hated enemy, and when is it something else: personal revenge or an instrumental, rational, or even coerced response to a situation, for example? Why do collaborators meet such harsh punishment and stigma when they are revealed as such? Can they ever atone or find redemption? Beyond the perception of the stakeholders involved, how harmful is collaboration? Does it exacerbate or abate violence? Is it always evil or can it sometimes be seen as mitigating wrongs? The chapters in Collaboration in Authoritarian and Armed Conflict Settings explore these thorny questions through a set of case studies, disciplinary approaches, and temporal and regional contexts. They show the range of the types of collaboration; the ubiquity of collaboration across time, countries, political systems, and political and cultural conflicts.

Juan Espindola, Assistant Professor, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas,Leigh A. Payne, University of Oxford

Juan Espindola is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was trained as a political theorist at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on violence, and transitional justice. He is the author of Transitional Justice after German Reunification: Exposing Unofficial Collaborators (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and his work has appeared in journals such as Theoretical Criminology, Bioethics, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Theory and Research in Education, German Studies Review, Res Publica, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Journal of Social Philosophy, and others.


Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College. She has written extensively on right-wing movements, transitional justice, and human rights. She is author of Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Duke University Press, 2008) and co-author of Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability from Below: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020 with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal-Bermúdez).

1 Coming to Terms with Collaboration: An Introduction,ÂJuan Espindola and Leigh A. Payne

Part I: The Politics of Collaboration

2 Native Intelligence: African Detectives and Informers in White South Africa,ÂJacob Dlamini

3 Be My Character: Framing the Female Collaborator in Postdictatorship Argentine Novels,ÂKsenija Bilbija

4 Collaborationism in Low-Intensity Conflicts: The Case of the Basque Country,ÂLuis de la Calle

Part II: Collaboration Moments

5 Collaboration and Opportunism in Communist Czechoslovakia,ÂMark Drumbl and Barbora Holá

6 Black Collaboration During American Slavery,ÂAndrea L. Dennis

7 Third-Party Collaborators in the Colombian Armed Conflict: A Paramilitary Case Study,ÂGerson Iván Arias and Carlos Andrés Prieto

8 Informing, Intelligence, and Public Policy in Northern Ireland: Some Overlooked Negative Consequences of Deploying Informers against Political Violence,ÂRon Dudai and Kevin Hearty

Part III: Holding Collaborators Accountable

9 The Collaboration of the Intellectuals: Legal Academia and the Third Reich,ÂOren Gross

10 Grudge Informers and Beyond: On Accountability for Collaborators with Repressive Regimes,ÂColleen Murphy

11 Business Collaborators on Trial: Legal Obstacles to Corporate Accountability in Argentina,ÂGabriel Pereira

12 International Law and Collaboration: A Tentative Embrace,ÂShane Darcy

13 Conclusion: Reckoning with Collaboration,ÂJuan Espindola and Leigh A. Payne

Index