Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation

I n 2022, the ceasefire between the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim–Isak-Muivah (NSCN–IM) entered its 25 year. While the ceasefire has greatly reduced violence between the group and security forces, it has by no means ended it. Despite recent moves to reduce the coverage of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the region remains heavily militarized; during times of tension in the peace talks, a game of ‘cat and mouse’ ensues between NSCN–IM militants, keen to consolidate their local influence, and Indian security forces seeking to contain the group. Occasionally, this boils over into armed clashes and fatalities, but is generally capped and managed ‘within tolerable limits’. What gives rise to murky no-war, no-peace scenarios such as these? Paul Staniland, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, seeks to address this question in Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation. Consolidating nearly a decade of both his own work on state-armed group relations and the broader ‘order turn’ in civil wars research, Ordering Violence’s central argument is that states’ ideological projects— interacting with tactical considerations—shape whether states enter into relations of alliance, limited cooperation, containment and total war with armed groups. While Staniland first introduced these four forms of ‘armed order’ in 2017, Ordering Violence adds theoretical and empirical depth to this research agenda and in doing so, makes an important and novel contribution to the study of conflict dynamics both in South Asia and beyond. According to the book’s central hypothesis, which is introduced in the first two chapters, States’ perceptions of armed groups vary broadly across two axes. Depending on a State’s ideological preferences, an armed group may be broadly ‘aligned’, ‘opposed’, or may fall somewhere within an ideological ‘grey zone’, while tactical overlap varies from ‘low’ to ‘high’. Combinations of these are theorized through a typology of both armed orders and armed group political roles across a spectrum of conflict and cooperation. Armed allies and mortal enemies sit at either end of this spectrum, but more interesting are those who sit between, such as ‘business partners’ or ‘strange bedfellows’ with middling or low ideological fit, but strong tactical overlaps (p. 31). This framework takes us beyond clunky explanations of armed group size and/or strength as a determinant of State responses, Strategic Analysis, 2022 Vol. 46, No. 5, 542–544, https://doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2022.2115229

factoring in the role of threat perception and more nuanced notions of tactical value (small groups may be highly knowledgeable of local dynamics, for instance). In chapter two, Staniland highlights that these orders 'are not locked in place', (p. 38) but are instead highly fluid and susceptible to change. Rather than outlining a tight theory of how armed orders change, Staniland charts out a few key pathways that may shape changes in tactical considerations (such as changing alliance dynamics and organizational splits) and ideological change, that can in turn shape changes in armed orders over time. This is an area in need of further theory-building; in particular, further research could unearth the ways state actors understand these events and relationships, and adapt processes of bargaining, violence and restraint with them in mind, to forge new orders.
The rest of the book then tests the theory's broad expectations with empirical chapters on India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Each chapter begins with a detailed overview of each State's post-colonial ideological projects and major shifts over time, using these to derive case-specific expectations before delving into the empirical data on armed orders. Staniland's empirical strategy draws on his novel dataset of Armed Orders in South Asia (AOSA) coding 211 State-group dyads across four countries in post-1947 South Asia. The AOSA data are accessible on Staniland's website 4 and the quantitative data are coupled with in-depth case narratives. While sometimes imperfect due to data limitations, they are an excellent resource, both for quantitative scholars grappling with patterns across armed orders and for those qualitatively tracing lesser-known dyads within each national context. As a result, the AOSA data offers lessons for scholars bridging quantitative and qualitative approaches and should accompany Ordering Violence on any course reading list.
Each chapter identifies broad patterns that often generate empirical contributions to knowledge on each conflict. In the Indian case, for example, it is now fairly wellknown that New Delhi has responded more forcefully to insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab compared to those in the central Indian heartlands and the Northeast. 5 In chapter four, Staniland adds further nuance to this two-dimensional comparison by charting out the 'three worlds' of Indian counterinsurgency (p. 116-123). Across the duration of India's Maoist insurgency, he notes that 'unlike Kashmir and Punjab, total war has not been so dominant, but unlike the Northeast, there has been much less limited cooperation' (p. 123), identifying important variations beyond existing explanations. The chapters then dive into specific cases; chapter five's account of Pakistani strategy along its northwestern frontier makes important distinctions between those Islamist groups that are and are not ideologically compatible with Islamabad (pp. 184-185), before feeding-in changing tactical considerations to make sense of the ever-shifting dynamics in this highly militarized region. The narrative in chapter six-which paints a picture of ideology-based total war with a flurry of tactical ceasefires since 1989-provides a lens to sift through Myanmar's dizzying State-armed group ecosystem. Although the analysis ends in the mid-2010s, through this framework we can view the resumption of hostilities post the 2021 coup as the collapse of these tactically-informed orders driven by a degree of ideological hardening and subsequent tactical shifts.
Perhaps due to the book's sheer scale and ambition, there are some missed opportunities to highlight sub-national, highly localized variations in armed order. For example, Staniland hints that limited cooperation is prevalent in Northeast India 'especially outside of Manipur' (p. 119) but offers little else on this curious yet fascinating nugget. Furthermore, while the data codes sub-national state-group relations (for example using federal sub-units), the dynamics of these relations vis-à-vis the State could perhaps benefit from further exploration with the AOSA as a starting point. For instance, while Staniland claims that 'the Northeast [of India] is a domain in which Delhi has dominated' (p. 112)-not an uncommon claim in studies of the Northeast 6 -sub-national structures have often interfered with, and subverted, preferred ordering strategies at the central level. In 2004, during India's long ceasefire of limited cooperation with the National Socialist Council of Nagalim-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM), for example, the state government of Arunachal Pradesh launched a brief, but aggressive counterinsurgency. 7 The book could have perhaps teased out some of the implications of differing ordering preferences and approaches by different arms of the same government, though institutional or spatial approaches to ordering are perhaps material for separate books altogether.
Ultimately, the book is about underlining the deeply political nature of Statearmed group interactions and charting out an agenda for further research. Through its parsimonious theory, comprehensive quantitative data and rich case study materials, the book does this to great effect. Ordering Violence and its accompanying data are must-reads for scholars of political violence, security and South Asian politics.