Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiv, 339 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9781501761119.
This ground-breaking book starts with the puzzle of why the Indian state perceives the religious-ethnic insurgency of Kashmir to be more threatening than the tribal-ethnic insurgency of Nagaland. While previous scholarship has focused on explaining variation in counterinsurgency by means of state capacity, regime type, external threats, or the capacity of rebel groups, Staniland develops a novel theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of state threat perception from different internal threats and armed movements. The author conceptualizes different state-armed group relationships or “armed orders”: (1) total war (full-out attack on rebels); (2) containment (tolerance of rebels as they remain below a certain threshold); (3) limited cooperation (live and let live bargains); and (4) alliance (cooperation between state and armed groups). This is a major conceptual contribution to the study of insurgency since it allows us to understand the murky political deals and “live and let live” strategies adopted by political leaders in South and Southeast Asia, and goes beyond the binary conceptualization of counter-insurgency as intense fighting leading to the defeat of rebels or states.
Staniland theorizes that what drives this variation in choice of armed order is the “ideological threats that governments perceive from armed groups” (2). Chapter 1 delineates three key dimensions along which a government’s ideological goals can vary and thus determine their level of threat perception from particular rebel or armed groups: (1) the nature and extent of ethnonationalist inclusion; (2) the place of religion vs. secularism in politics; and (3) attitudes towards redistribution of economic resources on a left-right ideological axis. Based on historically derived ideology from anti-colonial “carrier movements” like the Congress under Gandhi’s leadership in India, and the Muslim League under Jinnah in Pakistan, postcolonial states categorize armed groups as ideologically opposed, ideological aligned, or in a gray zone. Governments tend to use total war against ideologically opposed groups who have incompatible demands, and tend to use cooperation with aligned groups that pursue goals that are compatible with the government’s project, like pro-state militia and local private armies. Finally, gray zone groups are in tension with the government’s goals, but are considered tolerable by the state, which uses containment strategies and sometimes bargaining with such armed groups. Besides ideological fit, tactical overlap also matters in determining changes and nuances in the government’s response to armed groups, and Staniland develops a typology of six types of “armed orders,” based on whether tactical overlap is high or low, and whether ideological fit is aligned, gray zone, or opposed.
The book excels in adopting a multi-method research design. Chapter 3 presents the Armed Orders in South Asia (AOSA) dataset, which collects data on state-armed group political orders in six South Asian states, “from the rough and tumble of West Bengal’s electoral politics to the killing fields of northeastern Sri Lanka to the state-backed militias of Pakistan” (57). This is the first dataset of various types of armed orders in South Asia and is a valuable empirical contribution. Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 complement this quantitative analysis by studying the cases of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Sri Lanka and utilizing various kinds of historical and qualitative data to trace the causal pathways. In this review, I focus on the cases of India and Pakistan to outline the argument.
Chapter 4 is a tour-de-force of how the ideology of Congress Party leaders like Nehru and Patel determined how the Indian state has responded to its myriad internal conflicts and armed groups since independence. The Congress was more flexible about class redistribution, and this may have put the future Maoist revolutionaries that emerged in India in the 1960s and the 1980s in the gray zone. The state has mostly used containment against the Maoist rebels. The Congress was also more tolerant of ethno-linguistic demands, and future ethnic insurgencies in Nagaland, Mizoram, and Assam, while initially countered with total war, soon settled into patterns of containment and negotiated settlements. The “most fundamental, dangerous cleavage that new state elites perceived was the communal divide among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs” (101), and the state responded to religious insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir in the late 1980s with total wars and a heavy military response.
Chapter 5 shows that state ideology in Pakistan towards armed groups is the opposite to that found in India. Staniland describes how ethno-linguistic mobilization “was feared by military and West Pakistani civilian ruling elites” (156), which led to a total war strategy against the Bengalis and Sheikh Mujib in East Pakistan, and a mix of total war and containment against the long-running Baluchi insurgency. The Pakistan Army from Zia-ul-Haq’s time considered the Islamic religion-based armed groups to be in the gray zone, and dealt with them using limited cooperation and sometimes alliances. This continued under President Pervez Musharraf’s regime from 1999 to 2008, which saw negotiated deals and alliances with the Taliban. Finally, the political elite comprising the landlords and Muslim League in Pakistan viewed the left “with fear and contempt” and an initial leftist threat in Pakistan was easily repressed and eliminated.
The book provides a novel theoretical framework to explain much of the behaviour of states against different types of armed groups in South Asia, and masterfully combines qualitative data for the case studies with the quantitative analysis of the Armed Orders in South Asia dataset. What are possible avenues of future research building on the theoretical framework of this book? Other scholarship would suggest that it could be foreign funding and the geo-strategic position of Kashmir and Punjab as border states next to Pakistan that makes them more threatening, and that the location of the Maoists in interior tribal areas of India, far from sensitive border areas, makes them less threatening to Indian politicians (Ahsan Butt, Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). Staniland admits that in the case of the Maoist insurgency, “the two factors work together: an ideological challenge seen as manageable is combined with the deeply peripheral locations that do not have either strategic or political importance to Delhi” (122). Future research could try to disentangle the relative importance of geo-politics and state ideology by analyzing India’s northeastern insurgencies, on the border with China, which have seen variation over time in counterinsurgency efforts, ranging from total war initially to containment and limited cooperation more recently.
Another fruitful avenue of research could be an exploration of the colonial legacies of counterinsurgency that influence the Indian, Pakistani, and Burmese states. This would allow engagement with the recent historical turn in study of South Asian politics, where scholars have analyzed the effects of colonial indirect rule in creating inequalities leading to Maoist insurgency (Shivaji Mukherjee, Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), and how variation in forms of colonial rule influenced postcolonial patterns of development, and types of conflict (Adnan Naseemullah, Patchwork States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
As Staniland suggests in the concluding chapter, another avenue of future research could explore the role of ideology and strategy amongst the insurgency movements and armed groups. These are not incorporated into the theory focusing on state motivations. While this would make the theory more complicated, the role of rebel ideology and strategy in cases like the Baluchi insurgents in Pakistan or the Maoist rebels in India does play an important role in explaining patterns of violence.
Shivaji Mukherjee
University of Toronto, Toronto