Paul Staniland

States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders

Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, I offer a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution of territorial control and the level of cooperation between states and insurgents. Orders range from collusion and shared sovereignty to spheres of influence and tacit coexistence to clashing monopolies and guerrilla disorder. Examples from contemporary South Asian conflicts illustrate these concepts, which are scalable and portable across contexts. Scholars need to think more creatively about the political-military arrangements that emerge and evolve during war. A key policy implication is that there are many ways of forging stability without creating a counterinsurgent Leviathan.

Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia

A central question in civil war research is how state sponsorship, overseas funding, involvement in illicit economics, and access to lootable resources affect the behavior and organization of insurgent groups. Existing research has not arrived at any consensus, as resource wealth is portrayed as a cause of both undisciplined predation and military resilience. A social-institutional theory explains why similar resource wealth can be associated with such different outcomes. The theory argues that the social networks on which insurgent groups are built create different types of organizations with differing abilities to control resource flows. There is no single effect of resource wealth: instead, social and organizational context determines how these groups use available resources. A detailed comparative study of armed groups in the insurgency in Kashmir supports this argument. A number of indigenous Kashmiri insurgent organizations received substantial funding, training, and support from Pakistan from 1988 to 2003, but they varied in their discipline and internal control. Preexisting networks determined how armed organizations were built and how material resources were used. Evidence from other South Asian wars shows that this is a broader pattern. Scholars of civil conflict should therefore explore the social and organizational processes of war in their research.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Insurgent Fratricide, Ethnic Defection, and the Rise of Pro-State Paramilitaries

Ethnic insurgents sometimes defect to join forces with the state during civil wars. Ethnic defection can have important effects on conflict outcomes, but its causes have been understudied. Using Sunni defection in Iraq as a theory-developing case, this article offers a theory of “fratricidal flipping” that identifies lethal competition between insurgent factions as an important cause of defection. It examines the power of the fratricidal-flipping mechanism against competing theories in the cases of Kashmir and Sri Lanka. These wars involve within-conflict variation in defection across groups and over time. A detailed study of the empirical record, including significant fieldwork, suggests that fratricide was the dominant trigger for defection, while government policy played a secondary role in facilitating pro-state paramilitarism. Deep ideological disagreements were surprisingly unimportant in driving defection. The argument is probed in other wars in Asia. The complex internal politics of insurgent movements deserve careful attention.

Cities on Fire: Social Mobilization, State Policy, and Urban Insurgency

Major theories of civil war emphasize the social and military attributes of rural terrain as key causes of conflict. This focus has led scholars to ignore important urban insurgencies in the Middle East and South Asia. This article makes two arguments about the roots of urban insurgency. First, it shows that robust urban social mobilization is possible and common. This can provide a social base for rebellion in areas that prevailing theories deem unlikely sites of civil war. Second, the article argues that, given social mobilization, urban insurgency emerges when security forces are politically constrained in their use of violence, opening space for sustained violence. A study of the rise of insurgency in Karachi from 1978 to 1996 and discussions of Iraq and Northern Ireland illustrate the plausibility of this argument. State policy and strategy, rather than state capacity, can play a central role in civil war onset.

Militias, Ideology, and the State

Research on militias portrays them as subservient proxies of governments used to achieve tactical goals. The conventional wisdom, however, ignores the diversity of state–militia relations. This article outlines four distinct strategies that states can pursue toward militias, ranging from incorporation to suppression. It then argues that regime ideology shapes how governments perceive and deal with militias. A new theory of armed group political roles brings politics back into the study of militias. Comparative evidence from India and Pakistan shows that varying regime ideological projects contribute to different patterns of militia–state relations. These findings suggest that political ideas ought to be central to the study of political violence, militias should be studied in direct dialog with other armed groups, and a traditional focus on civil war should be replaced by the broader study of “armed politics.”

Defeating Transnational Insurgencies: The Best Offense Is a Good Fence

Transnational insurgencies’ unique challenges are not amenable to the offensive strategies that the Bush Doctrine emphasizes against terrorism. History strongly suggests that embracing a containment strategy, combining border defenses with aggressive propaganda and international intelligence cooperation, would be more successful in Iraq and beyond.

Ten Ways to Lose at Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency is one of the most important topics facing policymakers and scholars. Existing studies of counterinsurgency are very valuable, but sometimes adhere too strictly to sweeping dichotomies and paradigms. This article discusses ten specific mechanisms that lead counterinsurgent governments to squander their generally overwhelming power advantages. This mechanism-based approach can improve both policy and scholarly analysis.

Institutions and Worldviews in Indian Foreign Security Policy

This article explores the intersection of strategic worldviews and domestic institutions in the creation of Indias foreign policy.We first show that Indian electoral politics have weak links with foreign policy. Insulated bureaucracies and small groups of elites dominate policy making because most elected officials are focused on winning votes and building coalitions around other issues. The ideas of the strategic elite are thus very important. We then identify major strands of thought among these elites: specifically, the desire for autonomy, distance from alliances, and skepticism of binding international commitments. Though there is heterogeneity, these basic elements can be found across much of the political spectrum. This continuity, despite changes over time in international and domestic politics, suggests that India will continue to pursue freedom of action rather than becoming a close ally of the United States.

Caught in the Muddle: America's Pakistan Strategy

President Obama has placed Pakistan at the center of his administration’s foreign policy agenda. Islamabad is a pivotal player in Afghanistan and its decisions will have much to do with whether and how U.S. forces can leave that country. Al Qaeda and linked militant groups have used Pakistan as a sanctuary and recruiting ground, with the Afghanistan— Pakistan border areas becoming, in President Obama’s words, ‘‘the most dangerous place in the world.’’ Recurrent tensions between India and Pakistan frustrate and complicate U.S. initiatives in the region, where nuclear proliferation, insurgency, terrorism, and grand strategic goals in Asia intersect. Despite significant effort and expense, the strategy pursued by the Obama administration since the spring of 2009 has not delivered on its ambitious goals in Pakistan and the broader region. Pakistani security policy remains dominated by the military, the country’s economic performance and political stability are both troubling, and the broader region has become even less secure. The United States risks becoming caught in a set of interlocking dependencies that undermine its influence tightly linked to a troubled Karzai regime in Kabul, painfully reliant on the Pakistani army for logistics and intelligence, and reactive to an Indian security elite which expects to influence U.S. policy without providing much in return. Although there have been valuable initiatives on a

Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier

Abstract Analysts and policymakers agree that the Pakistani military has engaged in selective repression of and collusion with armed groups. Yet beyond this general observation, fine-grained theory and evidence do not exist to systematically explain patterns of military strategy across groups and over time. This paper provides a theoretical framework for explaining regime perceptions of armed groups and the strategies state security managers pursue toward different types of groups. It then probes this framework using a combination of new medium-N data on military offensives, peace deals, and state–group alliances in Pakistan’s North West and four comparative case studies from North and South Waziristan. We argue that the Pakistani military—the key state institution in this context—has assigned armed groups to different political roles reflecting both their ideological affinity with the military and the operational benefits they can provide to the army. This mixture of instrumental and ideological motivations has created a complex blend of regime threat perceptions and state–group interactions across space and time. A clearer understanding of how the military views Pakistan’s armed political landscape can inform policy debates about the nature of Pakistani counterinsurgency, as well as broader theoretical debates about order and violence.