The classical Weberian theorisation of state as an entity that holds monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, when situated in the context of South Asia, does not account for the numerous non-state armed groups—armed political parties, militias, private armies and insurgents—often exercise violence on par with or exceeding that of the state. This dynamic prompts an essential inquiry: what drives the state to repress certain armed groups while tacitly tolerating others? Why do scattered dissidents face crackdowns while organizations possessing significant military power encounter relative indifference or even tacit accommodation?

Paul Staniland’s book, ‘Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relation: From Conflict to Cooperation’ aims to conceptualize and measure this spectrum of relationships between the state and armed groups and expound the shifting trajectories, from conflict to cooperation, in South Asia.

He conceptualizes these state-armed group relationships as ‘armed orders’—a political relationship between a central government and a non-state armed group at any point in time—which begins when an armed group “emerges as a coherent actor, perceived by the government.” The author identifies four armed orders: total war, containment, limited cooperation and alliance. The state and armed groups systematically and consistently pursue one another in all orders, but with important variation in the nature of association and degree of violence. While theorizing this variation in armed orders, what the author tries to do is to bring ‘politics’ back into the study of political violence. He argues that the general assumptions about what regimes want and what they fear needs to be denaturalised. This is done by making ‘ideology’ an independent variable that accounts for the variation in armed orders. The author argues that a regime’s ideological projects, which are mostly but not exclusively about nationalism, inform threat perceptions by “generating maps of alignment and opposition.”

It’s not the objective military strength of the armed groups but their claims and demands in relation to these projects that determine what the government will perceive as legitimate, tolerable or completely unacceptable, establishing a political basis of regime threat perception and determining the broad space for conflict and cooperation. This answers our concerns about disproportionate crackdowns on groups with relatively limited military capabilities.

Explaining the origins of these ideological commitments, the author historicizes these threat perceptions by looking at the emergence of career movements that generate the ideas of politics prior to the seizure of power and creates continuity in the core principles of the governing movements. These become the indicators of what future governments may/may not view threat as.

The author presents three dimensions along which the government's ideological projects can vary; ethnolinguistic inclusion, religious/secular orientation and left-right spectrum of redistribution. This typology, while at a risk of oversimplification, surely does provide a starting point for comparing government ideological projects. This variable counters central role in the government's perception of groups however leaving indeterminacy for those that fall within the grey zones—groups that challenge regimes preferred polity on at least one ideological dimension but refrain from constituting unacceptable demands. To account for this, the author introduces tactical overlap as a secondary variable. He argues that shared immediate tactical interests can create a basis for cooperation even in the face of ideological disagreement. These two variables generate a typology of distinct political roles played by the armed groups: ranging from armed allies to mortal enemies and many occupying the murky middle grounds.

Having given us a static set of conceptualisation of politically motivated armed groups, the author builds on these arguments to identify the core variables that make sense of mechanisms of change, essentially putting armed politics in motion. Both armed groups and governments can shift their ideological positions which in turn alters their political relationship, but these are the most consequential changes, and are slow and contested processes. This makes their materialization very uncommon. Changes in tactical overlaps, though less dramatic, are relatively common as these interests are fluid and in response to dynamic challenges. The author first examines the fluid shifts in alignment choices, focusing on instrumental and tactical incentives and keeping the ideological factors constant, and then proceeds to unpack bigger questions of ideological shifts. This approach also explores how these orders end, with the armed groups either collapsing, getting incorporated into mainstream politics or hovering between the two through disarmament or demobilization.

Having given the readers a theoretical foundation, the author then moves to empirical evidence backing the theory and explains the methods to measure armed orders and ideological projects. He then provides a comparative analysis of the career movements and governments during and after colonialism in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma/ Myanmar.

The author asserts that while the existing datasets on conflicts are excellent, they use a total or annual death threshold to determine the entries in data and this tendency to focus on straightforward internal wars negates the understanding of violence as a more ‘ambiguous range of political interactions rather than just conventional insurgent-counterinsurgent conflict that is used in the book. To build a better relation between the concept and empirical data, the author constructs a new data set of state-group orders in these post-1947 South Asian countries called ‘The Armed Orders in South Asia’ project. This data set analyses the armed groups over the course of their existence — from beginning of interaction with the state irrespective of the involvement of violence through the termination— and provides a systematic and transparent coding of how states and armed groups have interacted across countries, levels of violence and types of non-state armed groups. In addition to this dyadic armed order, this project also considers other variables like self-description of armed groups, ceasefires and various contextual variables like external support that are crucial for understanding why these orders vary. The author, time and again, mentions that this data set needs to be accepted with the caveats and the limitations as the aim of it is not to tell us everything that we need to know but to better see the state-groups interactions across time and space. It shows that violent and nonviolent, and cooperative and conflictual, armed orders can be integrated into ‘a shared conceptual and empirical framework. This data set reveals an interesting insight that in most of independent South Asia, much of the time, armed groups have operated in manageably comfortable relationships with the state. The author asserts that this might be unique to South Asia, but similar examples have been identified globally, suggesting that these findings are tapping into a broader reality.

The author explores variation in armed order between non-state armed groups and the regimes that have taken power in postcolonial South Asia, focusing on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma and asserts that variations in orders are not related to general accommodation or repression but across different kinds of political cleavages within each context. The use of historical path dependency plays a crucial role in articulating how different ideological projects in these countries come from different places and lead to different forms of threat perceptions, and the implications of which are systematically represented in data on patterns of accommodation or repression and internal security policy of these countries.

India has a huge variety of mechanisms for managing the demand of the ethnolinguistic groups and, tribal and regional groups ranging from limited cooperation and containment while the same groups in Pakistan are subjected to intense levels of state repression as its founding elites struggled for decades in managing linguistic difference making it a substantial threat to their project. A threat of similar degree in case of India is religious or minority separatism as it rekindles the fears of partition.

Sri Lanka and Burma see a more bottom up ‘sons of the soil’ approach that targets ethnic minorities and demands majoritarian ethnio-linguistic dominance. The author argues that this leads to a series of cost, and objectively protracted counter-insurgency that are all about the question of boundaries of polity — from the inclusion of the Rohingyas to the acceptance of Tamils as equals. This is a rough sketch of the exploration of the origins and the eventual evolution of government ideological projects and patterns of armed order in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar. The author devotes individual chapters to each country, though they all draw on the aforementioned framework.

The research design of this book infuses comparative-historical approach with quantitate data sets. The author opts for a mixture of comparisons and case studies, and uses quantitative data with primary, secondary and interview sources. The author stresses the need to accommodate limitations and gaps in this approach to social sciences as it is not fully developed but is a crucial starting point in the development of a framework that suits the endogenous and complex processes that characterize armed politics.

The broad themes of understanding armed orders as a spectrum of relations, the need of historical construction of mainstream politics and incorporation of politics into the analysis of regime interests is what the book builds on throughout. This understanding of armed politics also has certain policy implications; accepting that there is no black and white path to stability in terms of absolute state monopoly and often a grey area of cooperation is better suited to achieve it, the government idea of threat perceptions need to be taken seriously as opposed to latching onto the obvious notions of what is acceptable and the understanding of state power needs to be reshaped from the classic Weberian assumption that state power is linked to violence monopoly as states make choices about the application of coercion and monopoly is always desired.

Staniland attempts to cement the existing study on armed politics with its limitations, instead of providing actionable solutions. The substantial disparities between the mechanisms of armed group agency and the book's theorisation of the regime’s perceptions and interests, and the selective focus on reasonably cohesive regimes with at least moderate state capacity, posits itself at the centre of literature's fallibility. It does not accommodate accounts of armed politics in places with fragmented regimes and weakened state capacity like contemporary Iran and the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, this omission is less of a shortcoming than an invitation for future research. 

Far from being a manual of prescriptive strategies, the book serves as a compelling intellectual project that reframes our understanding of conflict. It encourages readers to view violent political dynamics through the prism of both state and non-state actors. Paul Staniland’s love for typologies is prevalent throughout the book, with expansive data sets presented as simplified figures for better understanding. The writing is accessible to anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of armed conflict, even as it might come off as a highly data driven project that needs careful unpacking.