In Ordering Violence, Paul Staniland advances a broad approach to armed politics-bringing together governments, insurgents, militias, and armed political parties in a shared framework-to argue that governments' perception of the ideological threats posed by armed groups drive their responses and interactions.
Staniland combines a unique new dataset of state-group armed orders in India, Pakistan, Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka with detailed case studies from the region to explore when and how this model of threat perception provides insight into patterns of repression, collusion, and mutual neglect across nearly seven decades. Instead of straightforwardly responding to the material or organizational power of armed groups, Staniland finds, regimes assess how a group's politics align with their own ideological projects.
Explaining, for example, why governments often use extreme repression against weak groups even while working with or tolerating more powerful armed actors, Ordering Violence provides a comprehensive overview of South Asia's complex armed politics, embedded within an analytical framework that can also speak broadly beyond the subcontinent.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Armed Politics and State Power
1. The Politics of Threat Perception
2. How Armed Orders Change
3. Armed Orders and Ideological Projects in South Asia
4. India
5. Pakistan
6. Burma/Myanmar
7. Sri Lanka
Conclusion: Rethinking Politics and Violence
About the Author :
Paul Staniland is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, Associate Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Networks of Rebellion. Follow him on X @pstanpolitics.
Review :
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. This book is a must-read for all students and scholars of political violence.
(Perspectives on Politics) A remarkable example of both a thoughtful and innovative conceptual contribution and a rich theoretical argument that is rigorously tested using a mixed-method empirical approach. We commend Staniland on this substantial contribution to our substantive understanding of an important topic and expect that this book will serve as a prime methodological example for the field moving forward.
(American Political Science Association) The book provides a novel theoretical framework to explain much of the behaviour of states against different types of armed groups in South Asia, and masterfully combines qualitative data for the case studies with the quantitative analysis of the Armed Orders in South Asia dataset
(The University of British Columbia) Paul Staniland's remarkable book takes steps to unpack the complex relations between states and nonstate armed groups, which can take diverse forms and have very different implications for governance, state building, and violence.
(Political Science Quarterly) Ordering Violence will stand as an anchor work in the increasingly complex and compelling political science literature on civil wars and armed conflict. Staniland's central insight—that there is more to war than fighting—has deep implications for how to understand the relationships between states and those that they fight, or, in many cases, make deals with.
(e-International relations)
