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