Paul Staniland Book Adda — Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation

Events

Paul Staniland Book Adda — Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation

Friday, March 11, 2022

2:00pm - 4:00pm EST

Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

Commentators:
Yelena Biberman, Skidmore College
Fotini Christia, MIT
Vipin Narang, MIT
Megan Turnbull, University of Georgia

Paul Staniland is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Staniland is the faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations MA program and an Associate Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. His research focuses on political violence and international security in South Asia. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, was published by Cornell in 2021. Staniland is in the early stages of a book project on the consequences of major power competition for the internal politics of “swing” states in South and Southeast Asia since 1945.

Book Adda

About the book:
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.

To request special services, accommodations or assistance for this event, please contact us at southasia@brown.edu or 401-863-7665 as far in advance of the event as possible. Thank you.