Ordering violence: explaining relations between armed groups and states, from conflict to cooperation
By Paul Staniland
Cornell University Press, 2021
Paul Staniland is today one of the leading specialists in armed conflict. Her Ordering violence is a deeply sophisticated book that builds on and expands on Staniland’s past work, including his influential 2012 article “States, insurgents and political orders in war.” Ordering violence examines how and why states confront, cooperate, contain, or otherwise interact with armed groups. Simply asking this question represents a considerable advance over much of the thinking in the current political science literature on civil wars, which sometimes crudely assumes a binary conflict between incumbent leaders and rebels. Staniland shows that things are in reality much more complex. It groups the relationships that arise between states and armed groups into four armed orders: “total war, containment, limiting cooperation and alliance” (p.3). Attempting to explain why such orders may appear at different times, Staniland examines how “ideological threats that governments perceive from armed groups determine state responses” (p. 2).
Staniland makes a refreshing case for “taking ideas seriously” (p. 262). He objects to the frequent caricature of contemporary war that “there is no ideology, no politics beyond that of greed and survival” (p. 263). It is unfortunate, however, that he then continues to accept the ideas of other researchers without reservation. representations of Africa as responding to this model of “greed and survival” (I revisit the applicability of Staniland’s ideas to West Africa below). In addition to giving weight to ideological alignment or competition between states and armed groups, Staniland is also interested in changes over time and how certain events – such as “militarized elections” – can produce tactical cooperation between competitors, thus transforming them into “strange bedfellows”. » (p.40).
Beyond 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 data set on armed orders in South Asia (chapter 3), then into a discussion of armed orders in South Asia. case studies for India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar and Sri Lanka (Chapters 4 to 7). The case studies highlight Staniland’s close attention to history; it delves deep into the colonial past and highlights many political and conflict phases within each country, providing considerable texture that the dataset cannot capture. The book’s conclusion strikes a note of humility regarding the limits of Staniland’s arguments (particularly regarding “the mechanisms of action of armed groups”, p. 261). Staniland also reflects on the book’s implications for theory and policy, arguing in particular that “ceasefires, live-and-let-live agreements, and active collaboration can all limit conflict and protect civilians from the worst excesses of violence.” open war” (p. 273). . It’s a sobering but pragmatic suggestion: concluding comprehensive peace deals is not the only way to save lives, and such deals are generally not an option.
How well do Staniland’s ideas hold up when applied to another part of the world – West Africa, for example? The utility of Staniland’s typologies is clear: his four-part model of different armed orders could be productively applied to conflicts in the Sahel and Nigeria, as could his explanation of how different combinations of “ideological fit” and “tactical overlap” can produce different forms of armed order. “Strange bedfellows” are also numerous in the region.
But at the same time, things are even more complicated than Staniland’s typologies show – and so much information remains inaccessible to researchers that any typologization must be provisional, probabilistic and limited. Is it possible, for example, that several orders exist simultaneously within the “Boko Haram” conflict in northeastern Nigeria? Rumors circulate about the political economy of war and the relationship between local politicians and armed groups; Meanwhile, civilians and military personnel are sometimes at open disagreement, not to mention occasional signs of tension within the military hierarchy itself. Is it possible that “total war” and “limited cooperation” occur simultaneously, depending on the localities examined and the actors discussed? Even in Staniland’s careful analysis, there is sometimes an error in what some political scientists call the “unitary actor fallacy,” that is, the projection of cohesion and singular motivations and goals onto states and organizations. The unit of analysis in much of Staniland’s book is governments and armed groups, rather than individuals or factions; When individuals enter its narrative, it is often the leaders who are at the top. Similarly, although Staniland places change over time at the heart of his analysis, change in Nigeria and the Sahel has at times been so rapid that I am not convinced that any one dataset can account for the complexity of events and changes. In Mali, 2020 alone was marked by mass protests, a military coup, jihadist infighting, the kidnapping of a major politician by jihadists, then the negotiation of his release, and much more. Moreover. Such complexity cannot be encoded without enormous reductionism – which is precisely why case studies are so crucial.
This brings me to one final criticism of the book. As someone originally trained in the humanities, I found Staniland’s case studies to be very detailed but unreliable. In each case, and particularly in those discussed in Chapters 5 to 7, the references have focused on a relatively small number of secondary works. Staniland relies on some primary sources – Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters are cited extensively, as are Muhammad Ayub Khan’s diaries – but the reader hears relatively little of the conflict’s participants in their own words. For a book that “takes ideas seriously,” the protagonists could also have been taken more seriously. Incorporating their voices might have changed the analysis in interesting ways.
Generally, Ordering violence will constitute a landmark work in the increasingly complex and compelling political science literature on civil wars and armed conflicts. Staniland’s central idea – that there is more to war than fighting – has profound implications for how we understand the relationships between states and those they fight or, in many cases, with whom they enter into agreements.
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