0 A paramilitary group is organized like an army but is not official and often not legal.
In some countries, police and firefighters have paramilitary training.
1 a person who belongs to a paramilitary organization
2 similar to an army, but not official and sometimes not legal:
paramilitary forces
By 1998, the view of the parties tied to loyalist paramilitaries was that a way out of the violence had to be found.
By 1914, the army stood at about, 7,000 tirailleurs and 3,000 paramilitaries.
The paramilitaries are a cheap source of de facto security and summary justice.
Conscription hardly made it impossible to recruit private or semi-private militias, especially if a powerful political patron backed such paramilitaries, nor did it eliminate a great deal of low-level violence.
How easy would it be for former paramilitaries to leave the baggage of paramilitarism behind in terms of creating a new politics and a new policing?
The generals also took measures to organize the entire population into paramilitary organizations.
Why did these same democratic reformers tolerate and facilitate paramilitary repression following these reforms?
Military officers were promoted in spite of their well-known connections to paramilitary organisations.