Why do some armed groups elicit a harsh military response from the state, whereas others are ignored or tolerated? In Ordering Violence, Paul Staniland provocatively argues that state responses to nonstate armed actors are not driven by objective factors, such as size, power, or organizational characteristics, but rather by the perceived ideological threats such groups pose. In developing this argument, the book makes three significant contributions. Conceptually, Staniland introduces the notion of “armed orders” and encourages us to consider the variety of relationships that can emerge between governments and nonstate groups before, during, and after open civil wars. Theoretically, the book develops a theory of threat perception that emphasizes the role of ideology but also considers tactical incentives. Empirically, Ordering Violence centers on India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, providing both an overview of regional patterns and in-depth historical case studies.
Perhaps the most pathbreaking aspect of the book is its conceptual push to move beyond the study of civil wars or insurgencies and consider armed orders. The notion of an armed order is straightforward and intuitive: it is “the political relationship between a central government and a nonstate armed group at any point in time” (p. 3). Staniland identifies four armed orders: total war, containment, limited cooperation, and alliance. What makes the analytical focus on armed orders innovative and appealing is the recognition that “state-group relations occur outside of contexts and periods of traditional civil conflicts” (p. 9). For peace and conflict scholars, this means studying state–rebel interactions even when the casualty threshold of civil war is not met and moving beyond the focus on formal peace processes and demobilization. For scholars of political violence, it implies bridging the study of violent and nonviolent mobilization and exploring political relations over time. And for political scientists more broadly, the recognition that states may outsource coercion and accept various armed actors as part of “normal” politics presses us to “stop assuming that state power is necessarily linked to violence monopolization” (p. 269).
To be sure, contentious politics scholars have studied both violent and nonviolent mobilization, but most of this literature has focused either on arenas of strategic interactions (e.g., see Eitan Alimi et al., The Dynamics of Radicalization, 2015, and Donatella della Porta, Clandestine Political Violence, 2013) or on the tactical choices of nonstate actors (e.g., see Erica Chenoweth et al., “Introducing the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research, 56[2], 2019). Although the framework of armed orders is fundamentally about political interactions between state and nonstate actors, the overarching theoretical contribution of the book is centered on state behavior.
Ordering Violence proposes an elegant and parsimonious theory: state ideologies shape threat perceptions, which in turn generate armed orders (chap. 1). Ideological projects can be multifaceted, but here they are defined along three key dimensions: ethnolinguistic inclusion, views on religion/secularism, and left–right redistributive ideology. Groups that are perceived as ideologically aligned are more likely to become allies or be incorporated into mainstream politics, whereas ideological opponents are more likely to find themselves locked in total wars. When groups fall in the ideological “gray zone,” meaning they disagree with the state ideology on at least one ideological dimension but do not mobilize demands that “are seen as unacceptably out of bounds or impossible to resolve within standard political processes” (p. 29), state responses depend primarily on tactical incentives.
The focus on ideology and threat perception is compelling but not particularly novel: what makes Ordering Violence stand out is the way in which it layers parsimony with complexity and nuance. In addition to the proposition that ideologically driven threat perception shapes armed orders, chapter 1 touches on the complex historical processes that underlie the emergence of state ideological projects, pointing out that “material, ideational, and contingent circumstances combine in unpredictable and frequently unintended ways” (p. 24). Chapter 2 adds nuance by identifying several pathways through which ideological positions and tactical incentives can change. For instance, militarized elections, cross-border proxy conflicts, and multiparty civil wars can create conditions that enable states and nonstate actors to have overlapping interests. Ideological projects can also change, either rapidly after regime change or incrementally after leadership or party turnovers. Overall, Staniland suggests that change is “a domain of messy, endogenous interaction and contingency” (p. 55).
These nuances come out even more explicitly in the empirical chapters where Staniland dives into the historical analysis in an eloquent and engaging manner, making these chapters accessible and interesting for regional specialists and nonspecialists alike. Chapter 3 starts with a regional overview and introduces the Armed Orders in South Asia dataset, which identifies armed orders in six South Asian countries from 1947 to 2016. Although this impressive data collection will undoubtedly be valuable for future research on political violence in South Asia, the regional patterns that emerge tell a significant story that underlines the importance of the book. Rather than being rare exceptions, containment and limited cooperation are by far the two most common armed orders, supporting the conclusion that armed groups often operate in “manageably comfortable relationships with states” (p. 63).
After the second part of chapter 3 provides an overview of colonial legacies in South Asia and identifies which ideological projects became dominant at the time of independence and which ones were sidelined, the subsequent four chapters investigate in depth the armed orders in India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. Much of the focus in each chapter is on the origin and evolution of state ideological projects, offering a detailed and compelling story of why nation-building projects perceived some groups as more threatening than others, and how these perceptions changed under different leaders. The lens of ideologically driven threat perception can explain, for instance, why the Indian National Congress did not see the Left as an existential threat but perceived the communal divide between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs as the most dangerous cleavage, whereas Pakistani elites saw both the Left and ethnolinguistic groups as most threatening. In Burma and Sri Lanka, colonial legacies fostered “sons of the soil majoritarianism” (p. 230). Although the theoretical and empirical focus is on state actors and ideological threats, the book also zeroes in on more specific groups, such as the Naxalite insurgency and Naga armed groups in India, the Haqqani network and the Pakistani Taliban, and the Tamil insurgencies in Sri Lanka. These case studies unpack in detail how the mobilization strategies of nonstate actors affect state responses, as well as the complex political relations that can emerge and affect strategic calculations.
Staniland’s masterful analysis, while pushing us to rethink how we study political violence, also raises some questions about the role of ideology in armed orders. First, what exactly is the relationship between ideology and tactical imperatives? At first sight, the argument seems to be that ideology matters mostly when groups are either clear allies or opponents, but tactical overlap can better explain limited cooperation when groups are in the ideological gray zone. At other times, we get the sense that there is a temporal order: ideology determines the initial threat perception and places states and armed actors on certain paths, but subsequently strategic interactions shape the specific evolution of armed orders. In some of the case studies, ideas and strategic calculations seem almost impossible to disentangle, suggesting that they might be mutually constitutive. This would be in line with recent developments in social movement theory, which posit that identities inform strategic interactions, but that these strategic interactions in turn also shape identities.
Second, even though the book makes a compelling argument that ideas matter, it remains unclear whether they matter equally for both state and nonstate actors. Staniland acknowledges in the conclusion that the book focuses a lot more on the agency of states than that of armed groups. Indeed, it would be unreasonable to expect a theory to explain equally well the behavior and perceptions of both state and nonstate actors. But ideology is a critical part of the story, and one is left wondering whether states and armed groups are equally ideological. For instance, in the discussion of ideological change, Staniland suggests that state ideological projects can shift when actors change, which implies that the political preferences of state elites are fairly stable. Armed groups, in contrast, can change their positions in response to internal fragmentation, international pressure, and state policies. Although the discussion of group moderation and radicalization does not always clarify whether these processes reflect changing views regarding violence or an ideological change along the three key dimensions of state ideology, the larger implication seems to be that groups may be more ideologically malleable than state actors. This may not be due to ideological flexibility, but rather reflects necessary adjustments in the face of military weakness. Nonetheless, it paints a picture that runs counter to a prevalent view of rebel groups as rigid doctrinaires.
Ordering Violence is an ambitious book that is theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich, and remarkable in the honesty with which it tackles the challenges of data collection and analysis. The conclusion provides a model for how to use the strengths and weaknesses of an argument to identify new directions for future research and raise important questions for both scholars and policy makers. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars of political violence.
