Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation

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.
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