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Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Leo Bader and today my guest is Colby Hanson, professor of Government and Global South Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. Colby's new book, Ordinary Rebels, Rank and File Militants Between War and Peace, examines what happens when states decide to tolerate rather than fight or repress armed groups within their borders, how this changes the organization behavior and future of these armed groups. Kolbe conducted hundreds of interviews during field work in northeast India and Sri Lanka to understand how toleration impacts the thinking of regular recruits and foot soldiers. It's no secret that many of the conflicts raging across the globe today are wars between state forces and militant groups. And this book deepens our understanding of how this kind of intractable violence might be tamed. Colby, thanks for joining me.
- [02:53]
D
Thanks for having me.
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C
So why don't you start by giving us a little bit of background why you started to write this book, how you kind of narrowed down this question about state toleration.
- [03:03]
D
Well, in my time as an undergrad and then as a grad student, I spent a lot of time starting to think about long running conflicts around the world, especially long simmering conflicts. There's a whole host of conflicts around the world within states, often sort of distant separatist insurgencies, and that last for years, decades, and seem to have long periods of conflict, long periods of less intense fighting. And the more I started to dig into them, I did an undergrad thesis on the conflicts in Myanmar. And then as a grad student I went to northeast India, which has many of the same dynamics. And I was really struck by these periods of toleration which punctuate periods of active fighting. So in Nagaland, for example, there's really intense fighting in the 1950s and 60s. There's a long ceasefire peace deal that happens in 1975 and lasts through about 1990. A new group, set of militant groups emerge in the 90s, fight really intensely in the 90s, and then they kind of go into ceasefire more or less constantly. Since then, the militants are still around, there's no disarmament, they're not being cowed by the government. Right. They're not in hiding. They're operating, in many cases out in the open with armed bases near major cities. They still operate as if they are in conflict and they're just not in conflict. They signed a one page ceasefire with the government and just kind of sit there. And the trade off for the government is essentially if you stop fighting us, at least actively fighting government forces, you can operate and recruit relatively freely. You can patrol territory, in some cases, you can collect taxes from the population for businesses, in some cases from government officials. You can even use the threat of force to negotiate for some low level political gains of various kinds. It's buying peace with essentially free rent. Right. And it's not importantly, restoring the monopoly on force. Right. This is the thing that really shocked me as an outside observer, as someone who has sort of read in theory what states and what conflict is. I came across it and said, but isn't the only way to restore order to have the government be the only legitimate user of force? And if that's the case, shouldn't the government be doing everything it can to restore that in order to get that peace? And as I looked around the world more and more, I realized that this actually was a pretty common phenomenon. So whether it's frozen conflicts in the post Soviet space like in Georgia or Moldova, whether it's long simmering insurgencies in Philippines and Myanmar and India, even in cases where there's a really intense conflict, there can be a period of relative peace. In my book, I also look in depth at Sri Lanka, the Sri Lankan civil war, as intense as that was. You might have heard of the Tamil Tigers, as intense as that was. There was this period from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, four or five years, where essentially both sides just sit there. They have essentially the same agreement. All of these cases have the same dynamic of buying calm with free rein to do certain things on a local level. So the book I focus on three northeastern Indian conflicts, in Nagaland, in Manipur and in Assam, as well as the Sri Lankan conflict. But this dynamic actually happens quite commonly around the world. And it was a way into studying those dynamics of what happens to armed troops when they're no longer in a conflict scenario. We know a lot about armed groups when they're in a conflict, and we know a lot less about what they do, how they function when they're outside of it.
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C
So once states then decide to tolerate these armed groups, what do you find basically how that changes them?
- [07:36]
D
So there's two basic arguments to the book. One is that different kinds of people join. So during a period of toleration, more people join an armed group, life is easier. People would like to join an armed group, would like to join a group that they think supports their political goals without actually having to go through the danger and discomfort of active fighting. So it doesn't just mean being on the run and worrying for your life and dealing with that stress. It also means things like being able to set up a permanent base, being able to sleep in a tent or a building as opposed to out in the woods. It means a warm meal twice a day, three times a day. It means a few rupees at the end of the month to buy cigarettes. It means all of these very mundane lifestyle things, which I did not expect. You know, we read it a lot in conflict about diamonds and drugs and these other features. That are a little bit more, seem like more economically important. But the more I interviewed people in northeast India, the more I realized these very mundane features were a big part of why people joined or didn't. And so more people joined, but it also opens up the doors to all sorts of people who have more peripheral connections with armed leaders, their ideology and their social connections. And so the people who join are increasingly people who are not as loyal to the armed group's goals or to their activities. And so the result of that is that an armed group can be larger but also a little more difficult to manage. For armed leaders, the second big part of the argument is that increasingly recruits and supporters of all kinds, right, both these sort of core and these peripheral recruits tend to favor more moderate groups during times of toleration. When I say moderate, generally speaking, I'm talking about armed groups, right? Everyone is armed and willing to use force. But generally speaking, within any armed movement, there are groups that are more committed to the higher level or like more ambitious goal and those that are willing to settle for less ambitious goals, right? So in, in a separatist movement, that's very often people who say we're holding out for independence or nothing versus the people who say we're willing to settle for some sort of autonomy deal. And typically that's pretty sticky. Over time, those armed leaders tend to sort of get stuck in their positions. And so a lot of what happens is people are choosing between those two groups. And during a period of toleration, when the government is open to this sort of deal, even just being open to it makes the moderates more attractive, right? Because the moderates are willing to more often work inside the ceasefire, keep the ceasefire in place, provide an easier life for their, for their soldiers, but also achieve low level political goals at the cost of potentially fighting for the more ambitious goal. So during a time of toleration, moderates have a lot more to offer, right? During a time of, of active fighting, it doesn't really matter whether you're backing an extremist or a moderate, because either one is going to be fighting the government at full bore to survive. But when you open up this possibility for, for low level cooperation, moderates have more to gain. Whereas extremists might go in and out of ceasepire, they might do other, or they might just be more committed toward fighting. So given that that's the case, that means moderate factions are start going to, to start winning recruitment competition. Moderate splinter groups might have more success breaking away. Moderate leaders within an armed group might have more to gain. Right. And it's all precipitated by is the government willing to work with these groups in this way.
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C
So it sounds like these groups under toleration almost acquire a sort of social welfare function that they haven't had in the past and that beyond fighting a conflict, they also provide a sort of basic social structure for people that maybe otherwise don't have one.
- [11:59]
D
Yeah, for their soldiers certainly. Right. So one of the lines that I heard a number of times throughout my field work was, oh, to these new recruits, it's just a job. Right. It's just a thing that they do. And that's a little bit derogatory. Right. What they're saying is really like they might care about the movement, but they don't care enough that they'd be willing to risk their lives or comfort for it.
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C
Right. And you choose to look at not the leaders of these movements, but at rank and file recruits, as you say, people who might see this just as a job and not more. What drives that methodological choice?
- [12:37]
D
Well, in the last decade or two, there's been a lot of really great work in civil conflict on how the organizational structure of armed movements and armed groups, more within those movements, shapes outcomes and conflict of who wins, whether a peace is possible, how civilians are treated, all sorts of different outcomes. They tend to be looking at things like is the movement divided or is it united? Is the movement led by moderates or extremists or is the group highly disciplined? Right. Does the leadership have alignment with the soldiers and able to control the soldiers behavior successfully? So if we think those things are important. I was always struck by how much this sort of skips over what I think is some important strategic behavior, at least strategic preferences. So under what conditions do different types of people join? If we think discipline is primarily is largely about who joins and whether they actually care about the movement in the first place. Why do people with aligned or not aligned goals join? If we think splintering matters and the leadership of moderate and extremist group matters, okay, I can have a leader breaking away, but if that leader doesn't get any support, they're just one person, it doesn't really matter. They're not an armed group. So I was always left with these questions of why do rank and file recruits and soldiers, as well as supporters, civilian supporters, back certain groups under different scenarios? And in the context of my book, my questions, it's largely about how might that be different during periods of. Of toleration versus crackdown, active fighting. So that's the sort of theoretical pitch. But what does that actually mean in practice? And in my book, it involved a lot of a combination of interviews and then these pretty cool survey experiments that I ran in Assam and Nagaland. The survey experiments were, the goal was to interview the types of people who might actually join an armed group under different conditions. So in northeast India, this is somewhat possible because there have been these ceasefires with various groups. And so even if not every group is under ceasefire, militancy is talked about more openly and is a little bit more accessible. And so it's possible to do things like going to ethnic activist organizations where armed groups are known to have ties, talk with the people there and ask them questions about what sorts of things might make them interested in joining, or people like them interested in joining, as well as tea shops and moonshiners and stadiums and other places where young men hang out and might be interested in being picked up by an armed group, maybe. Right. So the goal here was to survey these people and see what sorts of things might cause them to join. Right. Instead of just focusing on the people that do join to see who could join and then what sorts of factors might affect their decision to do so. And the way to do that, the way I do that at least, is a conjoint survey experiment. So a conjoint survey experiment is a hypothetical. Is in this case, saying, imagine there's a bunch of armed groups of your ethnicity fighting for your ethnic group's independence or autonomy. I'm going to show you a bunch of those groups described on a bunch of different dimensions and ask you about each one. How interested would a young man like you? I tried to ask the question in a way that was. We pilot tested this, a way that was getting to someone's individual preferences while also giving them a little bit of plausible deniability of what they were exactly saying, and then varying independently, randomizing the different aspects of that group. So how strong it was, how many soldiers it had, how disciplined it was, what the social ties of that group were to the individual's community, what their goals are. So whether they were hardline or more moderate. And then material perks, as I talked about earlier, I also randomized whether all the groups were described, whether we were in a scenario in which the government was offering a ceasefire to rebel groups in your area, which is typically, at least the way it works in East India. And so this not only allows me to sort of test the very specific claims underlying the argument of the book, it also provides some pretty novel evidence in general on the micro foundations of rebel recruitment and allows us to learn more about in general, are certain claims that we assume are true about individuals in conflict actually true? We also interviewed people, older men in the same settings who tend to, at least in this scenario, sort of hang around and be sort of community gatekeepers as a proxy for okay, what about the civilian community that might influence both recruitment decisions and just the behavior of general civilian society toward armed groups.
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C
I'm curious about whether you see any kind of homogeneity among in the situations in which a state decides to tolerate an armed group. In other words, are armed groups already sort of entrenched in a certain region, or do they have a degree of military or political power that in some ways sort of makes the option more attractive for the state? And if that's the case, does that make it difficult to research because you don't have examples of smaller, less strong, maybe more fanatical armed groups that never end up getting tolerated in the first place?
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D
So a lot of people looking at, say, toleration in the first place, certainly the where I started was assume this is about state capacity, right? This is about does the state have enough power to deal with these particular rebels? And if not, they're willing to deal with them. There are certainly cases where that is a relevant consideration. So the frozen conflicts in the post Soviet space, the threat of Russian intervention, or the reality of Russian intervention in in Georgia, in Moldova, the threat of Armenian intervention in Nagorno Karabakh, et cetera. Right, that. Absolutely. That has played a big role in very particular contexts. Once you get outside of those contexts, though, it's much more mixed than you might think. State capacity, more general, as a more general point, is a matter of costs and benefits, right? States have a lot of security concerns within their borders. They have to pick and choose what is worth bringing force to bear in any particular scenario. So that means that there's all sorts of other considerations going on, which creates variation on this, on this dimension. Two examples of that. Myanmar. The military government of Myanmar started negotiating ceasefires in 1988, 1989, suddenly, right. They had been fighting pretty intensely against all of the armed groups up in the mountains for decades. And then suddenly in 1988, 1989, they started trying to negotiate with almost all of them. Why did, why 1988, 89. Because they had a massive series of democracy protests and a massive uprising at the center of the country. And that made them interested in trying to make deals all around the periphery of the country, right? To redirect their forces from the outside in. And so that's an example of priorities change. Sometimes you reorient your security strategy, and that means tolerating certain threats and deal and focusing on others. So Paul Staniland has written a great book on the South Asian context. In particular, his argument is a little bit different, which is that states actually have a pretty strong perceptual bias about what sorts of armed threats are threatening to the core of the state. And that bias is toward an ideological understanding of what the state is. So, for example, in India, why are Sikh insurgents in Punjab so much more threatening? Why does the government respond so much more dramatically in the 70s to Sikh insurgents than to northeastern insurgents? That's because religious violence has torn apart India from its beginning, right? So partition was such a formative moment and it played such a big role in elite's understanding of what India is, that religious violence, the threat of religious separatism, was just simply a much bigger threat or perceived as a much bigger threat, then the ethnolinguistic groups in the northeast. Ethnolinguistic diversity is just a normal part of Indian politics, and armed violence is just a slight extension of that. In Pakistan, it's reversed where Pakistan. What has torn Pakistan apart from its beginning has been ethnolinguistic separatism. So most, most dramatically, in the case of 1971, Bangladesh, East Pakistan, Bangladesh independence. Whereas religion is what holds Pakistan together. And so fundamentalist jihadist groups in, in the. The Fatah, the administered federally administered tribal territories, those. Those groups are much less threatening to the Indian state. And so there's a sort of ideological element or perceptual element that Creates lots of different variation. Right. So the groups in the Northeast are about equally strong in terms of their sort of rank and file strength to Kashmiri insurgents, for example, and yet they're treated completely different. Obviously Pakistan plays a big role in the thinking in India on that front as well. But you have these big differences. Assam and Manipur are the two cases I look at that do not have long periods of toleration in comparison with Nagaland, which does. It's pretty clear to me Nagaland is easier for the government to sort of let go in part because it's viewed by the state as so ethnically different that it's not as threatening. Right. Nagas are generally viewed as Southeast Asian racially not, not South Asian racially. They're generally. They're Christian as opposed to Hindu. There's. And Nagaland is an economic backwater by comparison. Right. It's mountains, there's not a lot of valuable industries. And so for all of those reasons, right, that have nothing to do with the strength of the rebels, that have nothing to do with the strength of the state, even in the region, they're willing to let Naga insurgents operate more, more independently. And so I used in particular, qualitatively, I like the comparison better of Nagaland to Manipur, but for logistical reasons, it was a lot easier to do the survey experiments in Assam demonstrating that the same basic individual level preferences still are at play.
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C
You mentioned earlier that toleration tends to increase the influence and the power of moderates within armed groups. I'm curious if this leads then always to splintering, that the more extreme ideologues create their own group, or do they sometimes get kind of absorbed and change their own views because they realize that their approach to militancy is not really working in the situation they're in anymore. How does the increasing power of moderates tend to affect the actual organization of the group?
- [26:52]
D
So it depends a little bit on the organization in the movement already, who has power and whatnot. I'll give you the two examples that I can draw from most clearly in Nagaland and in Sri Lanka. So in Nagaland you have, in 1997, when the ceasefires are first offered, you have essentially equally ish powerful moderate group and extremist group. That's the nscn. IM is the moderates and NSCNK is the more hardline group. The hardliners are a little bit more powerful. But it's pretty similar at that point. Basically over the 20 years after the ceasefires, the IM, the more moderate group grows and grows and grows in stature. It builds its resources, it builds its recruiting base. It builds into all of these areas that used to be NSCNK strongholds. They become the largest and most dominant group by a pretty wide margin. And it seems like their moderation is a big part of their appeal. But in addition to that, three different more moderate splinter groups break off of each of those. So there are moderate splinters from the hardliners, from the kids, that's the NSCNR and the NSCN kk. And then there's even the sort of an earlier split from the NSCN im, which is the unification, which ends up merging with the kk. That is, you know, so you have, as opposed to one moderate and one hardline group you end up with basically the hardliners are basically pushed off of Indian territory at this point. You have the moderates as the dominant group and then even more moderate splinter groups sort of making complications for the negotiations. Right. Anytime the im, they've been trying to negotiate a peace deal with the government for at least 10 years. We don't know how long they were negotiating before then. Every time the government runs into trouble with the iim, they try to work out a side deal with the other with the three more moderate proofs. So that's one example of what might happen. A second one is in Sri Lanka. So in Sri Lanka, over the course of from 1983, the beginning of the war, there are to 1999, 2000, the Tamil Tigers go from one of a bunch of different small militias, Tamil Tiger separatists, insurgent militias, to by the end of the 80s, they're really the only major group. And extremism seems to have played a pretty big role. And this is where the definition of extremism I think is actually pretty critical. They're definitively not Marxists. They're definitively not a bunch of other things that we often think of as extremist as opposed to their competitors within the movement, many of whom are, what they are is absolutely uncompromising hardliners. And they make it very clear we are going to fight for independence. We are not going to negotiate ever. And in the context of the 1980s, of these really intense government crackdowns that followed the 1983 anti Tamil riots throughout the country, that isn't a quite attractive proposition. And then 2001, 2002 happens. The government is in financial trouble. There's a new government in power. They want to look like they are making peace for a variety of reasons. They offer an indefinite ceasefire, official peace Talks break down very quickly, within a couple of months. And yet the ceasefire lasts for 5, 6 years, depending on how you define it. The result of that is during that period, you have the one moderate breakaway group in the history of the Tigers, and it's the Karuna faction. There's a lot else going on with Karuna. I'm not saying sort of moderation is the only aspect of that, of that breakaway, but I think I have documented in the book pretty well that moderation is a really important part of the sales pitch that he's saying we need to negotiate with the government, we need to take a reasonable deal. He's the only major Tiger leader to attend peace talks. At least he's a lot more willing than any of the military folks are and a lot more willing than especially Prabhakaran, who's the leader of the Tigers. That ends up going quite poorly in some ways. Right? He at first attracts about a third of the rank and file of the of the Tigers, and the main body, the Northern Command of the Tigers, essentially invades the east, crushes the Eastern Command, crushes this moderate breakaway group, and Karuna ends up fleeing into government custody. That still ends up being disastrous for the Tigers. They've lost a significant amount of their rank and file. Their biggest military planner, Karuna, is now in government custody and handing over significant strategic and tactical level plans to the government. But it's an example of a case where even when you had a completely unified extremist opposition to the government, you had this fracture that was possible as opposed to. In previous years, there had been a few attempts at breakaway groups from the Tigers and they were crushed almost immediately because they couldn't attract support. In this case, Karuna really did and was able to build that. And so whether it's strengthening moderate fracture groups, whether it's sort of strengthening moderate factions already within a movement, empowering moderates is a big piece of what happens during toleration.
- [33:10]
C
And in the cases where this leads to a group becoming much larger but perhaps more diverse in the level of commitment that its members have, how does this affect the group's behavior in the long term? I'm thinking of HTS in Syria, which for a while kind of had its own region and was doing its own thing. And then earlier this year sort of saw an opportunity to renew conflict and was ultimately successful. But clearly toleration was not sort of an end deal. Is that common or.
- [33:44]
D
So it's a little bit hard. When you have as intense of a conflict as Syria, a lot of the Sort of assumptions of the theory. It's hard to apply them. I think this works. Some of the arguments make more sense in the context of a long, simmering conflict that's a little less high intensity, that, like, the threat of violence is always so high in Syria that you never really get into this toleration, toleration mode. But more generally, right. So attracting a larger group of people, many of whom might have different ideas from. From the leadership of the armed group, could mean a lot of different things. It could mean there's more common desertion or defection. It could mean there's more common sort of low level indiscipline, especially around civilians. So people often think of indiscipline as like civilian abuse, but it could be the opposite, right? It could be someone's abusing a civilian to line their own pocket. It could be someone is giving special treatment to civilians that they shouldn't be giving special treatment to and not enforcing the armed group's sort of goals for society. And so exactly what it looks like, it really depends on the particular context. But you could see this kind of low level in discipline. And even in the case of the Tamil Tigers, you had an extremely developed system for overseeing behavior. The most extreme I think I've heard of in any armed group. Right. It's multiple levels of observation on every single person, lots of layers of bureaucracy to mandate behavior. What I heard over and over was the new people joining the movement may not act out in any obvious way, but they're clearly lazier, they're clearly sort of loafing around when they can get away with things, they do. What it really means, though, is when the systems of policing tend to break down, say when you go back into the most intense conflict, and especially when you start to lose in a conflict, some of the guardrails might come off. So even in 2006, 2007, as conflict was scaling back up, there wasn't a lot of desertion within the Tigers. 2008, 2009, as they started losing an open conventional war against the government, there was suddenly mass desertion. And it was largely mass desertion among the people who had joined since the beginning of the ceasefire. At least this was the narrative that I kept hearing from former Tigers and civilian observers of the Tigers that, you know, in the Northeast India context is much more mundane, like civilian abuse and people lining their own pockets, you know, with extortion, et cetera. Or it's just general laziness, misbehavior, people not showing up when they're supposed to that sort of thing. But it does suggest, right, that the group becomes better suited for the sort of mundane types of interaction that happen during a ceasefire, during a toleration period, than open warfare, right. They become sort of happy in peace and might really be ill suited or break down when they get into more intense, intense conflict.
- [37:17]
C
To finish, I've seen a lot of work that talks about the effects of state repression on armed groups and argues that by increasing the cost of violence for them, they might also become more pacified or a little bit less extreme and choose kind of a pragmatic avenue. And your book is sort of saying that toleration can do the same thing, not by raising the cost, but by providing an incentive to not engage in violence anymore. If repression and toleration can have the same effects, how do they differ, maybe in the strength or the kind of holding power of the reduction in violence?
- [38:05]
D
Well, as I've said, I think one of the principal contributions, not just of my work, but Paul Staniland and Ana Arjona and some others, is to break apart the idea of deterring militant mobilization with deterring violence. Right. If we operate under the assumption that peace is a restoration, needs a restoration of the monopoly on force, then there is no distinction. But in fact, there's. You know, when you look at these toleration examples, it makes it very clear they're actually quite different things. Right? And what toleration often is, is not. Is not tolerating violence per se. It's. Or at least violence with the government. It's tolerating mobilization and activity. And so the distinction here is you can simultaneously with that incentivize people to take up arms, especially people who don't care that much about the movement to. While also setting the conditions that deter violence, right? Increasing the support for moderates over more hardline extremist groups and sort of making it more difficult for these groups to go back into conflict in the first place. And so for states, that may or may not be worth it, depending on how valuable territory is, depending on how valuable, sort of eliminating militants or eliminating criminality or eliminating sort of any other things that are associated potentially with militant activity, as opposed to just limiting violence, right? If it's worth it for a state to completely restore its monopoly on force, to have direct control and not have to deal with the nuisance of militants on a local level, if it's worth the intense cost of fighting, then states might be willing to do that. And in lots of cases, probably most cases, states are willing to do that. It however, by tolerating, you can normalize militants, right? You don't eliminate them or, like, cause them to put down their arms, but you can normalize them into politics, into this, like, awkward, ambiguous status quo between war and peace. That kind of happens on the peripheries of large states. I've heard it called durable disorder in the Northeast India case. Disorder is probably the wrong word, right? It's not disorder in the sense of violence, it's disorder in the sense of just militants doing things and causing problems. But that is a trade off that states may be willing to make and often are, depending on their security concerns. Right. I think one of the things that is lost in, say, the history of state building in Europe is just how many non state actors were involved in the development of states, especially on a local level, how much, instead of defeating rivals for the monopoly on force, states sort of worked with them and slowly integrated them into the state. So that's a trade off that states may be willing to work with under the right conditions. It's not necessarily that they know all of what is going on in my book. I think there are a lot of conspiracy theories in conflict zones of, oh, they actually intended us to get weaker by giving us this ceasefire from talking to government people. I really don't think that's the case. I really just think they want to buy peace and they're happy kicking McCann down the road on a conflict if it means lower cost and being able to redirect forces elsewhere, especially in large states. So I think that is essentially the trade off for states is that they might be willing to reduce the cost, even if it means this sort of ambiguity.
- [42:18]
C
Well, we should wrap it up there. Colby's book, Ordinary Rebels, Rank and File Militants Between War and Peace can be purchased through the link on the New Books Network. Goldie, thanks again for joining me.
- [42:29]
D
Thanks so much, Leo.