Ordering violence: explaining armed group-state relations from conflict to cooperation
go through Paul Steinland
Cornell University Press, 2021
Paul Staniland is one of today’s leading scholars on armed conflict.his order violence is a highly complex book that builds on and expands on Staniland’s past work, including his influential 2012 article “States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Order.” order violence Consider how and why states confront, cooperate with, contain, or otherwise interact with armed groups. Even raising this question is a considerable advance over much of the thinking in political science’s current civil war literature, which sometimes crudely assumes a binary conflict between incumbents and insurgents. Staniland shows that things are actually much more complicated. He divides the relationship between states and armed groups into four armed orders: “total war, containment, limited cooperation and alliances” (p. 3). Staniland attempts to explain why such orders may arise at different moments, examining “how the ideological threat governments perceive from armed groups drives state responses” (p. 2).
Staniland refreshingly advocates “taking ideas seriously” (p. 262). He counters the frequent caricatures of contemporary warfare by arguing that “there is no ideology, no politics other than greed and survival” (p. 263). . In addition to focusing on ideological alliances or competitions between states and armed groups, Staniland also focuses on changes over time and how certain events, such as “militarized elections,” create tensions between rivals Tactical cooperation, thus making them “strange bedfellows”.
In addition to the introduction and two theoretical chapters (“The Politics of Threat Perception” and “How Armed Orders Change”), the core of the book consists of a discussion of Staniland’s South Asian Armed Orders Sourcebook (Chapter 3) and then Case studies of India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka are discussed respectively (Chapters 4-7). These case studies demonstrate Staniland’s keen attention to history; he delves into colonial history and highlights the many phases of politics and conflict within each country, providing a wealth of texture that a dataset cannot capture. The book’s conclusion shows some humility about the limitations of Staniland’s arguments (especially regarding the “mechanisms of armed group agency”, p. 261). Staniland also reflects on the book’s impact on theory and policy, notably claiming that “ceasefires, coexistence agreements, and active cooperation can all limit conflict and protect civilians from the worst excesses of open war” (p. 273 ). It’s a sobering but pragmatic proposition: a comprehensive peace agreement is not the only way to save lives, and such agreements often don’t happen quickly.
How effective are Staniland’s ideas when applied to other parts of the world, such as West Africa? The utility of Staniland’s typology is clear: his four-part model of different armed orders can be effectively applied to conflicts in the Sahel and Nigeria, as can his different combinations of “ideological fit” and “tactical overlap” The explanation of how to have an impact is the same. Strange bedfellows abound in the area.
At the same time, however, things are messier than Staniland’s typology suggests, and so much information remains unavailable to researchers that any typology must be provisional, probabilistic, and limited. For example, in the Boko Haram conflict in northeastern Nigeria, is it possible for multiple orders to exist simultaneously? Rumors abounded about the wartime political economy and the relations between local politicians and armed groups; at the same time, there were sometimes open disagreements between civilians and military officers, not to mention occasional signs of tension within the military hierarchy. Is it possible for “total war” and “limited cooperation” to occur simultaneously, depending on where we look and the actors in question? Even Staniland’s careful analysis sometimes falls into what some political scientists call the “single-actor fallacy”—that is, projecting cohesion, a single motive, and a purpose onto states and organizations. The units of analysis for much of Staniland’s book are governments and armed groups rather than individuals or factions. When an individual enters his narrative, it is usually a senior leader. Likewise, while Staniland makes change over time a core part of his analysis, changes in Nigeria and the Sahel are sometimes so rapid that I don’t believe any dataset can capture the events and complexity of change. In 2020 alone, Mali saw mass protests, a military coup, jihadist infighting, the kidnapping of a leading politician by jihadists and subsequent negotiations for his release, and more. This complexity cannot be encoded without great simplification—which is why case studies are so important.
This brings me to my final criticism of the book. As someone trained in the humanities, I found Staniland’s case studies to be very detailed but poorly sourced. In each case, particularly those discussed in Chapters 5-7, the references focus on a relatively small number of ancillary works. Staniland does draw on some primary sources—Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters are widely quoted, as is Mohammad Ayub Khan’s diary—but what readers hear from participants in the conflict themselves There are relatively few words. For a book that “takes ideas seriously,” the protagonists might also be taken more seriously. Including their voices might change the analysis in interesting ways.
on the whole, order violence will become a pillar work in the increasingly complex and compelling political science literature on civil wars and armed conflicts. Staniland’s core insight—that war is more than just fighting—has profound implications for how states understand the relationship between states and those with whom they are warring (or, in many cases, coming to terms with them).
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