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How do non-state armed groups form in intra-state armed conflicts? Researchers have started to disaggregate armed groups, but we still know little about how armed groups emerge in different ways. Drawing on the literature on social movements, civil wars, and civil–military relations, we generate a typology of 'movement', 'insurgent', and 'state splinter' origins of armed groups. We argue that fundamentally different dynamics of conflict shape armed group origins in the context of broad-based mobilisation, peripheral challenges to the state, and intra-regime fragmentation. Armed groups that emerge in these contexts in general differ in their initial membership and leadership, the basic organisational dimensions that we focus on. We demonstrate the utility of our typology by mapping different origins of armed groups onto existing cross-national data and charting type narratives in illustrative cases. This discussion advances recent efforts to understand the importance of armed group emergence for outcomes of interest to conflict scholars by moving beyond either separate types of origins or highly disaggregated organisational analyses to broader conflict dynamics through which armed groups form, with implications for how these groups act. Future research should consider different origins which we identify in comparison through an in-depth analysis of armed groups' complex histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to an 'historical turn' in security scholarship. It addresses imbalance in security studies' attention to historical empirics, and argues against notions of temporal disjunct prevalent within the discipline. I employ a genealogical framework to clarify the interpellation of past and present; and I introduce the 'conceptual archive' as a lens for pursuing that interpellation in research. My thesis on the 'conceptual archive' represents a twofold contribution. Firstly, a conceptual contribution: I advance the 'conceptual archive' as a way of thinking about past-present interpellation (specifically, existing conceptual logics' remodelling in arguments justifying new practice). Secondly, an analytical contribution: I propose the 'conceptual archive' as a tool for doing genealogy (a research programme with historicising promise, but one suffering nebulous operationalisation at present). I use the field of terrorism studies as an entry-point to these contributions: adopting a mixed-methods research design to trace British counterterrorism practices' roots within an 'archive' of logics on Northern Ireland. I find 1970s British governments remodelled long-standing 'archival' vocabularies in their arguments for new security provisions: framing exceptional practices according to an accepted fabric of concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]