How do non-state armed groups act when the state seeks not to crush them—but to tolerate their activities? This is the central question of a new book by the political scientist Kolby Hanson titled, Ordinary Rebels: Rank-and-File Militants between War and Peace.
Kolby is an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, and his new book looks at how state toleration fundamentally transforms armed groups by shaping who takes up arms—and which leaders they follow.
The book draws on a range of innovative surveys and in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. The book looks not so much at what armed groups do when they fight—but what they do when they don’t.
To talk more about his new book, Kolby joins Milan on the show this week. They discuss what it means to be a “likely” recruit of an armed group, the complex political economy of India’s northeast, and the way in which state toleration operates on a spectrum. Plus, the two discuss the prospects for long-term peacebuilding in South Asia and how Kolby’s new book sheds light on the troubling January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Episode notes:
1. Paul Staniland, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).
2. “The Past, Present, and Future of India’s Near East (with Avinash Paliwal),” Grand Tamasha, November 20, 2024.
3. “Paul Staniland on the Surprising Decline in Political Violence in South Asia,” Grand Tamasha, October 7, 2020.
4. “Binalakshmi Nepram on the Realities of India’s Oft-Forgotten Northeast,” Grand Tamasha, June 3, 2020.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav: Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and The Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. How do non-state armed groups act when the state seeks not to crush them, but to tolerate their activities? This is the central question of a new book by the political scientist Kolby Hanson titled Ordinary Rebels, Rank-and-File Militants Between War and Peace. Kolby is an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, and his new book looks at how state toleration fundamentally transforms armed groups by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. The book draws on a range of innovative surveys and in-depth interviews, tracing four armed movements over time in both Northeast India and Sri Lanka. The book looks not so much at what arm groups do when they fight, but what they do when they don't. To talk more about his book, I'm pleased to welcome Kolby to the show for the very first time. Kolby, congrats on the book and thanks so much for taking the time.
Kolby Hanson: Thanks so much for having me.
Milan Vaishnav: So I wanna start with the very first couple of lines of the book and just quote what you write there. You start the book by saying, “For most scholars and practitioners, armed groups bring to mind the sound and fury of warfare. Just as often, however, militant groups, even those with explicitly anti-state goals, operate under far more mundane conditions.” And I wanna just zero in on that last part. Tell us a bit about the so-called mundane conditions you're speaking about. How and when did you kind of decide that you were going to focus on this one aspect of armed groups' existence that really wasn't about the fighting?
Kolby Hanson: I've been interested in civil wars, civil conflicts in general, since I was an undergrad in college. And in that stage, I was learning a lot about these civil wars around the world, the most intense civil wars which tend to draw people's eye, whether it's the news or whether it is scholarship or everything. We're thinking of Bosnia in the last decade, we've been thinking of Syria, places where the fighting is really intense, the issues are really existential. And there's a lot of, every moment seems life or death. But the more I started doing work around conflicts, first in Myanmar, I wrote a thesis as an undergrad, and then in grad school came back to it looking at Northeast India. I was really struck by places like Nagaland that had conflicts that had not ended. They had really intense periods of fighting, but there were long periods where there was not disarmament. There was not a settlement. There was not defeat. Everyone was still there. And yet everyone just sort of agreed either formally or informally not to fight. And the government was relatively okay with armed groups operating, recruiting, sometimes collecting illicit taxes, sometimes using the threat of force to pressure government officials on low-level political issues, all of these things that looked a lot like the state willing to cede a monopoly on violence. And that really cut at the core of my understanding, and I think a lot of our understandings, of what happens in civil war, why civil wars are so bad and so difficult to resolve. If there's a violation of this monopoly on the use of force, who can trust each other? Are we just in a Hobbesian state of all against all? And so how this works in these cases was really puzzling to me and really pushed what we know about civil wars and what we about how states work in odd directions that I was puzzled by. And the more I looked across the world, the more, I realized that this pattern wasn't just some peculiar nature of the hills of Myanmar or Northeast India, it happens around the world, right? You've got cases like various the various conflicts in Mindanao and in the Philippines, which have gone dormant in this kind of way for long periods without any kind of disarmament or defeat. You've got all the frozen conflicts of the post-Soviet world, the Gona Karabakh Abkhazia. You even have periods where There's a negotiation for a peace agreement, but the negotiation takes years and years and everyone agrees not to fight for extended periods. That's so Sri Lanka is an example of that-- they ended up not making an agreement. Northern Ireland, they ended up making an agreement, but like the whole 90s basically was this unilateral ceasefire that was accepted effectively by the government. And so I was curious how, both why these situations are so able to be persistent, how is it possible the government and militants can agree to disagree for so long, and what happens to armed groups during this period, how they're different and how that might extend our understanding. The sort of statistic I like to bring up is in that cross-national study, I found that 40% of separatist conflicts since the end of the Cold War ended, quote unquote, with this kind of, ceasefire where no one disarms, no one, uh... No one disarms or is defeated or even in fighting, but just everyone agrees to disagree. And it might be formalized, it might not be.
Milan Vaishnav: The centerpiece of this book, in many ways, is this series of kind of survey experiments that you do with about 400 likely militant recruits in Northeast India. You also do a bunch of interviews. You also survey civilian elders and so on and so forth. And that's obviously an important part of this because you want to understand when you're an armed group that's not actively fighting, like how do these groups survive, how do they attract new members, and what kind of members do they attract, right? I think the first question that I had as a reader, and I think a lot of readers would have this, is like, what does it mean to be a likely recruit, right, and how do you go about meeting a likely recruit?
Kolby Hanson: Northeast India makes this easier in some ways, which I'll get to in a second. But the overall motivation here is there are lots of ideas that we have about how armed groups work under the hood, that depend on pretty strong assumptions about who's joining, what groups they're joining within a movement, what factions, etc. And the underlying drivers are actually pretty hard to observe in most cases. It's tempting to just do the sort of interview side where you look at who does join, right? The people that do. But to me that leaves out some really important questions about who are the potential people within society who might be joining an armed group and if armed groups acted differently or if the government acted differently, how might it change the types of people who go from potential to actual recruit or actual supporter? And so, my goal in this was to sort of find this larger group that might potentially join under the right conditions if the armed group has the right features, if the government is reacting in the right way, if this situation is right. And so in Northeast India, the way we did this, the fact that the government has been okay agreeing to ceasefires with certain groups means that a lot of militancy is a little bit more out in the open and makes it possible to do these kinds of, to see recruitment and and armed operations in action a little bit more.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean the basic idea is like if the state is tolerating your existence up to a certain point then you don't necessarily have to fully do all of the things that you do in the shadows because like the state knows you're there and there's some consent there, right?
Kolby Hanson: Exactly. So that fact enables me to do some things that I think most scholars of civil wars looked at and said, oh, that would be impossible to sort of dig a little bit deeper into what's motivating individuals. And so the process in practice was not only can I do all of the interviews, talk to current and former members of armed groups at both rank and file and sort of leadership level. To be clear, for my project I interviewed current members of in-ceasefire groups and former member of not-ceasefire groups. I felt for safety and ethics purposes that was necessary. But at the same time, I was able to, even just doing my interviews, I was surprised that people were perfectly happy to let me in to what were effectively militant recruitment sites, right? So, I was able to go into ethnic activist organizations that are well-known. These are student associations in Northeast India that are known to be sort of like recruitment hotbeds. I was to go into tea shops and moonshiners and other places where armed groups are known to recruit. I felt for the sake of the actual surveys, that it was probably better if I was not present. I'm very obviously, very obviously white, very obviously a foreigner. And so what I was doing, and I speak English, so what the actual surveys took the form of was I worked with a group of local research assistants, I had three in Nagaland and three in Assam, that I worked with, we developed a sort of approach. They would approach people in these settings, where we know armed groups do recruit, and just strike up conversations. They were doing some research work on the national movement, or some other phrasing that's neutral, but also clear in the local context. And ask if we can ask questions about it. And I would have thought from the outside that this would be too sensitive of a topic. I found that that part is actually quite a not sensitive topic. That in places like Nagaland and Assam, armed groups are sort of thought of more as mundane actors in politics. And so, asking those questions was a totally reasonable thing to do, even in the settings where they're actually doing the recruiting. And so, there were screening questions just to make sure that people were like, at all supportive of the armed movement. But generally speaking, right, these are settings where young, un- and underemployed men hang out, so like, you know, 18 to 25-year-olds are hanging out, and they might at some point be approached, either because this place is highly associated with the sort of causes of the movement, so ethnic activist organizations, or because this is just a place where lots of un or underemployed men are hanging out--that's tea shops and moonshiners. And so, you get these two sort of groups of recruits: one is a potentially sort of a little bit high commitment or highly socially networked with the armed movement, and those that are a little bit less so but are convenient recruits under certain conditions, And to sort of then ask those people uh a set of questions we the centerpiece is a conjoined survey experiment which is it comes from marketing, you say to someone, would someone like you in this context, because we want to give people some plausible deniability, be interested in joining potentially a group that looks like this under these conditions, and have a bunch of things that we're talking through, the strength of the group and the social ties of the group, the lifestyle perks that the group offers, etc. And by randomizing those features independently, we're able to see, if we change this feature, how does it change people's willingness to join? That was the key, was to be able to change those features and see how it changes these reactions that people have, who joins and which groups they'd be interested in joining.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, I know this is like an incredibly serious topic, but you know, when you read the book and you get to this point about, you know how one critical factor of the lifestyle perks are like all kinds of ideas go in your head, like is there a beachfront view? Is there like an air conditioning room? Like what are these perks? You know, in terms of the research sites that you were focused on, you mentioned them already, but you did work in Nagaland in Assam. Manipur, another state in Northeast India. You also did work in Sri Lanka. I mean, obviously, these are not easy places always to, kind of, carry out work. So, tell us a little bit about how you settled on these, sort of, four cases.
Kolby Hanson: Northeast India is a useful place in general to do research on insurgency because you have all of these comparison cases available, right? You have three, used to be four, before Mizoram, the armed group settled in the eighties. But basically, three major separatist independence movements in Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. And then you have all of these other ethnic movements that are also looking for statehood or some lower form of autonomy within the state. And so, the comparisons are easier in that case. But as I said, it was surprising to me the degree to which these topics are sort of mundane in local politics, that if you get in the right social networks, you can kind of just ask people who their friends are and ask them to set up things. So this is all good field work. My understanding relies on good research assistance. I had amazing research assistants in Northeast India and in Sri Lanka. But the fact that these things were sort of out in the open made it a lot easier to say, I would love to get an interview with a senior commander in one of these armed groups. I ended up, I think, interviewing senior commanders in three of the Naga groups. Then, yeah, lower level officers and others, and rank and file, and basically all. But it's possible to do those things because, of course, my research assistant went to school with someone whose father was a senior officer. The things right so. Once you get in small enough communities, it's very possible to do these things. So, the sort of logic of all of these cases, Nagaland has a very nice discontinuity in time. You have a shift in 1997 from very intense fighting in the 90s to suddenly the government is willing to offer indefinite ceasefires to any armed group. The terms are basically the same. They're one page. It's very simple. If you don't attack us, you can continue to operate and recruit and carry arms where you want to. Also, by the way, under the table, we're perfectly happy if you collect taxes, if you pressure government officials in certain ways. Not in dramatic ways, but in some. ways And so that nice discontinuity in time is a nice opportunity to be able to say, how did that shift the movement? And then the logic of Manipur and Assam is these are two cases that look a lot like Nagaland in a lot of ways, but didn't have this dramatic change over time. And how does that compare? For example, you might be concerned that people have nostalgia about the past in the Nagaland case, and that might bias people's answers. And I was curious to get cases where that wasn't true. For the sake of the book, basically it was interviews in Manipur, because I think that's a more direct case comparison, a more logical, more comparable case comparison. And then the survey work in Assam, both because I thought my contacts were better to be able to set those things up, and because in part, it's a different case, right? It's a case where it's a larger population, a more diverse state with more, with basically, that's never had a sort of moderate armed group in opposition to the more hardline ULFA. And so there's a, it's a more different case. And then I had concerns, as a lot of people did when they talked to me about this project, that is this something peculiar about Northeast India? Right? Is Northeast India just a weird place? It's up in the hills and it's all that I think is a little overblown especially with Assam is quite different than the more hill regions. But I had questions about what if an armed group was better organized in terms of their disciplinary structures? What if a conflict was higher salience? What if it was existential to the government effectively? What if there was higher intensity in general? Sri Lanka was nice in that it had, despite being all of those things, it still had this period of four and a half, five years in which the government was willing to sit in ceasefire with the LTT, with the Tamil Tigers from basically the end of 2001 to mid-2006. There's a little bit of gradual shift into conflict on the back side of that, but there's still this very dramatic, you go from one of the most intense civil wars in the world to everyone just sitting on opposite sides of a fence and Tamil Tiger members, like going to visit family in Colombo, and getting films brought in for the first time from the outside, and all of these interactions with the world, and aid is coming in from the UNDP. It was very surprising that we see some of the same dynamics in this very different case, and to see how well the theory traveled to that other case.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, I want to get in a little bit into this whole question of toleration, right? Because the core argument of the book really is that state toleration kind of normalizes armed groups from the inside out, right, and it leaves them in a place where they're better adapted to coexistence as opposed to fighting war. And, you know, just to kind of, so we're all on the same page, I mean, tell us a little bit about what you mean when you use the term state toleration, right? And give us a sense of why governments would tolerate armed groups, right, because there is this tension, as you alluded to earlier, which is like, well, if one of the core functions of the state is to kind maintain a monopoly on the use of violence, you are explicitly not doing that when you are tolerating giving room for armed groups.
Kolby Hanson: So, as I said earlier, what I mean by state toleration is a willingness to coexist with armed groups to some degree, right, to tolerate their operations, their recruitment, their patrolling territory. And then sometimes these other things, taxing civilians and intimidating local government officials, these sorts of things, tolerate the use, the sort of threat of violence from these groups as long as there's not active fighting. So, you know, you can think of this on a spectrum, right, and on one end of that spectrum, you can thing of Kashmir for certain periods of intense fighting or Punjab in the 1980s, the Khalistan movement, like real dedicated government crackdown that's basically permanent, right? That they're going to treat this as a mission to search and destroy at almost every moment over a certain period of time, at least, to like a more containment strategy where they're not going to actively seek out too much, but they're definitely going to, like, make military overtures. So, I think the “Red Corridor,” the Maoist movements over the last 20 years, it's a little less in the last 10 but, or, you know, pushing it more thinking Nagaland in the 2000s, right? Periods where the government is willing to sort of like sign these indefinite ceasefires and/or just like act as if there's an indefinite ceasefire going on. And then, I would say there's another level to that that doesn't really exist in South Asia, but like the frozen conflicts of the post-Soviet space where states are effectively ceding de facto sovereignty entirely of a region. So, I think Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, that would be the more extreme version. One thing that I think I haven't brought up is that my findings are that basically this only happens in separatist conflicts, that states are unable or unwilling to have this sort of coexistence if an armed group has a potential national following, has as its goal overthrowing the government. So, half of civil wars are separatist conflicts, so that's not like a huge restriction, but it does mean that the dynamics are a little different and explains a little bit why the government is willing to do that. The other thing that I'll say is, governments have lots of security and non security priorities, and it might simply not be worth it to fully establish a monopoly on state violence if you can get the peace element out of it. If the government says Nagaland is very far away, It's the... its rebels don't want to come here. They don't want to operate outside of ethnic Naga regions. And they don't seem ideologically so threatening to our core understanding. So, this is a, Paul Staniland has a, has a great book on this subject, basically arguing, Hey, there's a, there is a fundamental difference between religious separatism in India and the way it's viewed and ethno-linguistic separatism. Ironically, it's reversed in Pakistan. And it's some sort of ideology of the state, understanding of what makes India, India, that religious separatism, for very good historical reasons, is viewed as existentially threatening. So, all of those reasons, there's the state priorities, it might not be worth it in a far-flung region, or there's something ideologically unthreatening about the movement.
Milan Vaishnav : You know, when you're when you talk about state toleration and how that shapes armed groups from the bottom up, you're really talking about two different processes. And I want to just ask you maybe to unpack each of them because there are kind of two separate elements to what you're doing in this book. The first is that you make the case that state tolerations shapes who is willing to step up in joined arm groups, right, in the first place. And then secondly, state toleration is also going to shape which leaders recruits prefer to follow us. I wonder if you could just say a little bit about those distinct processes.
Kolby Hanson: Yeah, that's a great description. So, the first mechanism is it changes which types of people are willing to join an armed group, right? When joining an armed group means danger and discomfort, it means running from the government, sleeping out in the in the woods, sleeping out in the rain, eating, cold meals. Only the people with really strong ideologically, the ideological or social connections to armed groups are likely to want to join, right? Only the true believers or the true sort of connected people. It's not necessarily they believe in the high ideals of a group, but also just they have some gut connection to the group.
Milan Vaishnav: So that's kind of the, they constitute kind of your hardcore base.
Kolby Hanson: Exactly. But when the government is willing to tolerate armed groups, that means that armed groups buy potentially, like if they go into ceasefire, they have access to all of these other people that might join a movement if it's easy. And that's not impugning motives. There's lots of reasons why you might prefer to join a group during these periods of less intensity. But it does mean that you don't have this screening effect of only the true believers, only the most committed people join. You might think, in ceasefire, I bet these groups don't have any raison d'etre and therefore, no one wants to join them. In every case I've looked at, the groups have significantly expanded their size because more people are willing to join under these periods of safety, right? And especially you can think in relatively low-income settings, I can work on a farm, or I can hold a gun and be a tough guy part of this thing. Again, I'm not imputing the motives here, but there's lots of reasons why it might just be more attractive for people that would otherwise be scared off by the danger and difficulty. And that means a bigger movement, but also one that is less predictable, maybe less disciplined, acts more unpredictably around civilians in either direction, right? It might be people are sort of like giving unfair, they're giving good treatment to people they're supposed to be punishing, or it might be that they're sort of, like, settling scores against people that they are supposed to being treating well. In other words, it's they're acting in their own interests rather than in the interests of the leaders of the armed group. And so that means... Less discipline, maybe less willingness to go back to fighting, maybe they'll desert when they go back to fighting and a little bit more heterogeneity in motives within the movement. The second piece is that which leaders get support, I think, changes. So movements are often divided between more hardcore or hardline armed groups—ones that have stronger opinions, less willingness to sort of settle for something short of absolute victory than others. So the sort of hardliner versus moderate distinction. During times of conflict, those groups are both fighting for their lives. But during times of ceasefire, right, the government's able to sort of open up this avenue by which armed groups could get some of what they want, but not all of it. They can live a little bit more comfortably, but they can also intimidate government officials for small linguistic policy changes or tax policy changes, or all these other things, small gains for the movement. While giving up on if you're not fighting the government, you're going to win independence. So that's attractive to moderates, and the things that moderates have to offer—suddenly they have a lot more to offer. Whereas extremist groups, more hardline groups, are going to say either we can keep fighting and try to actually get independence, or we have to settle for this deal that doesn't seem great to us, and our recruits are probably not going to think is all that great, given that there are these other easier opportunities. And so, it's possible that they sort of like, you know, ceasefire for two or three years is, oh, great, we can rebuild our forces. But ceasefire for 10 is probably not going to be appealing to them, to a hardline group. And so, there's this like, oh they'll go into ceasefire, and then they'll bounce out of it, and we'll go into ceasefire, and they'll bounce out of it, and its sort of alternating fighting with the government and ceasefire. All of that means that for your average recruit or supporter, moderation looks a lot more attractive during periods of ceasefire or during periods of toleration right where ceasefire is an option for armed groups.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, when you talk about periods of toleration, one of the things that I thought was really interesting is you kind of say this at one point that toleration is best understood as kind of operating on a spectrum, right? I mean you have kind of lower levels of toleration, higher levels of toleration, so tell us a little bit about what those ends kind of look like in real life.
Kolby Hanson: Yeah, so what I was describing earlier of like the spectrum from Kashmir, Punjab in the 80s to Nagaland on the other end, is this kind of like, at least within the South Asia context, there's like South Ossetia or whatever. But that spectrum means sort of more and more, the government is open to this kind of toleration, this kind of coexistence with armed groups, not necessarily that they will, that armed groups will reciprocate, but some groups will—probably the more moderate groups will. And so, it's the opened option that changes things.
Milan Vaishnav: You know, one of the big insights in this book is that, and you kind of just summarize this very nicely, is that state toleration opens up the door for armed groups to achieve pretty modest goals without having to give up their arms permanently, right? And one of effects of that is that it encourages more rank-and-file recruits and soldiers to join moderate factions, and it kind of marginalizes or cuts out extremists. Now, there's an alternative argument, and you confront it in the book, but I'd just like you to maybe do it for our listeners, which is to say, well, toleration actually could have the opposite effect, which is it's giving armed group space to regroup, to remobilize, to rearm, to refinance, and that can create an opening for extremists to essentially try and outbid moderates. Now, does this happen, and if so, under what conditions?
Kolby Hanson: That is not necessarily... That is not necessarily incompatible with the argument we're looking at. There might be certain conditions under which, especially over a short period of time, armed groups might be able to mobilize. And maybe even under certain conditions, if they're already sort of well positioned socially or other things, extremists might benefit from that. You would not see sort of a long period of peace in that case or a long period of ceasefire in that case. But in the long run, as I said, you're going to see more people drawn on average to these more moderate groups because the legitimacy and ideology of the hardliners really relies on combating the government. And so, if there are these other options available, if there is a feasible moderate option, they're likely to benefit. Even if that means going from 5% of the movement to 10% of the movement, that might be a significant shift. An example of this in the Sri Lanka case, by 2001, the Tamil Tigers, actually by a decade earlier, the Tamil Tigers had eliminated all of their opposition within the Tamil armed movement. They had done so largely by being uncompromising in these periods of really intense fighting. There was very legitimate concern on the side of the government. If you let them sit in ceasefire, they're going to get stronger. What happened is that they indeed did incorporate a lot of new soldiers. Those soldiers, as far as I can tell, really intense organizational discipline were following orders for the most part, for most of that period. Once those disciplinary structures started to break down in the heat of battle, you started to see a lot more desertion. In general, already you sort of see laziness or other forms of low-level indiscipline going on, even before that. At least that's what I understood from my interviews. But more importantly, which groups they joined element was a real problem, which is the extremists did gain more supporters, the main body of the Tamil Tigers. But the real beneficiaries of the ceasefire were the Eastern Command under Colonel Karuna. So, he essentially sets himself up as a moderate difference or a moderate alternative to Prabhakaran, who's the chief leader of the LTTE. And he sort of builds his own army during this period. There's some of it that is built on conscription. That's a little bit outside the theory of the argument, but a lot of it has built on just genuinely people who are tired of fighting, especially in the Eastern command. And lots of people end up joining this group because they think he will actually preserve the ceasefire and he actually might be open to more collaboration with the government. And this results in a massive land campaign. The Northern Command effectively invades the East. It's a military disaster for Karuna; the Eastern Command is basically wiped out. So, you might say, oh, this is all just the Northern Command's stronger and stronger, except they've just eliminated a huge core of their most dedicated fighters because they've defected and literally Karuna escapes into government custody for protection and he's feeding battle plans as far as I've understood throughout the final stages of the war. That looks an awful lot like even though the hardliners won, they still were really damaged. Prabhakaran was really damaged by this process. And so, the benefits don't seem to convey and the sort of principles that I'm outlining still seem to be doing something that actually is positioning hardliners in a weaker position or at least moderates in a stronger position.
Milan Vaishnav: Just to kind of give people a bit of a concrete sense, you know, you talked earlier about the work you did in Nagaland and where you had this really nice discontinuity in time, right? Because it was 1997, I believe, where you've had the ceasefire arrangement. Without kind of going into all of the gory details, just tell us a little bit about qualitatively, like what you see at that inflection point, right. You have these groups, they're engaged in serious, intense conflict with the state, you have a ceasefire. What happens?
Kolby Hanson: At that time, there's essentially two major Naga factions, the Khaflung faction, NSCNK, and the Isak Muiva faction, the NSCNIAM.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, I'm so impressed that you can rattle these off. It's one of the things that our mutual friend, Paul Staniland, does regularly. I'm like, I don't even know how you can keep this in your head at the same time.
Kolby Hanson: I spent a fair amount of time in Nagaland in particular, and so I got familiar with all of these people. No, but you have the sort of hardliner faction and the moderate faction. What happens, the moderate fraction immediately signs the ceasefire in 1997, the hardliners do not. From 1997 on, the moderates gain and gain and gain in terms of the recruits that they're pulling in, territory that had been exclusively NSCNK territory became NSC NIM territory in terms of recruitment, in terms of support, in terms of just operations. The hardliners sign a ceasefire in 2001, but they spend the next 14 years bouncing in and out of ceasefire and practice. And then in 2015, they basically break out of the ceasefire entirely. So, in general, in the movement, you see more people joining the movement but increasingly people that are being described by leaders as materialists, people who don't really care about the movement. I got a remarkable number of complaints from commanders about their own soldiers and how disciplined or uncommitted they were.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, these might be opportunistically minded people who joined when the going was good, as opposed to the people, as you mentioned earlier, who are the more hardcore, either ideologues or socially connected who are tied more closely to the movement.
Kolby Hanson: Exactly. So that's at least the narrative. And based on what I've read elsewhere, and based on how universal this was, I get the sense that this is just the narrative that everyone in Nagaland basically accepts as what happened to the movement. And so, as this happens, you get more people in the movement, but less committed, more disciplinary problems. You also have the moderates increasingly out competing in the recruitment and support market, the more hardliners, that by 2015, by the time I was doing my interviews, essentially, the hardliners were basically pushed out of India entirely, they had fled largely over the border into Myanmar, and the group of soldiers and leaders that were actually Khaplang supporters the longest in eastern Nagaland switch in 2015. Either they fled to the NSNKK, or to the Reformation, or to the IM. So, three, two more moderate factions. And then, so that's setting up, there's this additional thing that happens, which is three new armed groups form, all setting themselves up as even more moderate alternatives to the moderates, to the IM. And so, each of these groups sort of versus first the unification breaks off of IM and then another group breaks off of the Khaplang faction that sort of semi-joins with unification becomes NSNKK. And then the Reformation breaks off in 2015 explicitly in reaction to the hardliners breaking the ceasefire in 2015. And so by 2015, 2016, what happens is you go from, you know, a relatively moderate and a relatively hard-line faction to a pretty strong moderate faction, a dominant moderate faction and then three even more moderate alternatives to it. And so-- and then this change in sort of under the hood of who's joining as well. And that has real implications for how civilians are treated, how peace is negotiated, all of these things.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to just stick with the Naga case for a second, but ask you to kind of think about a longer timeframe, right? Because towards the end of the book, you raise this issue of the link between state toleration of non-state armed groups and peace building, right, which is also an outcome we really care about. Tell us a little bit about how the state's stance affected kind of, civilian life and prospects for peace over the long duration.
Kolby Hanson: All of this leads in a lot of ways to cementing this awkward, ambiguous status quo, short of a full status arrangement. So, the IM signs the ceasefire in 1997. They don't even start negotiating a status arrangement for Nagaland and disarmament and peace deal until 2014, 2015. It's a little unclear because they did it in secret, but they released their first document in 2015. And then haven't really made any progress beyond that one-page outline. They've continued to have deadlines. They've continued to have negotiations, and it really hasn't been settled in any meaningful way. And part of that is, you'd think the moderates are in a good position. They can negotiate with the government. They've sort of pushed out the hardliners, but the government is kind of fine with this situation. And they've got three even more moderate groups that they can play off of the moderates and say, if you don't give us a better deal, we'll just make a partial peace arrangement with these other groups. We'll just make a deal with them and that'll give us legitimacy. It'll have the structure of a movement, and it'll cut out your access to government officials. It'll cut your access money from the state. It makes it so that this awkward status quo kind of repeats itself. And those groups are in a weaker and weaker position to go back to fighting because they've gotten so much of their support based on their commitment to ceasefire and commitment to these, sort of, lower-level goals.
Milan Vaishnav: We haven't really talked so much about Assam and Manipur and so let me just try to kind of sneak them in here at the end. They offer a bit of a different perspective, right? Because in these cases, the state refused to tolerate militants, right? You see the state having a very different approach. I guess there's sort of two questions here for you. One is, why did the state adopt such a different posture? Number one, and number two, what effect did that have on armed groups? And ultimately, again, the same question the prospects for peace.
Kolby Hanson: So, the reasons why the government do is a little bit outside of the main focus of my book. So, my information here is a bit sketchier. I have a basic understanding. You have both Assam and the Imphal Valley and Manipur, [they] are these much more economically developed regions, much more economically connected to the broader Indian economy, especially Assam, but to a lesser degree to Manipur and as opposed to the sort of Nagas are mostly in the hills and they're very, you know, it's underdeveloped and sort of outside of the broader Indian economy. And so, in some ways it's less economically valuable to get stronger control over those areas for the government, but also more broadly, Assamese and Manipuris are Hindu. They're sort of viewed as "more Indian." In some ways, there’s an easier time with certain leaders, I think, in India treating the Nagas as a special case. Those are two potential reasons, but there's a lot of ambiguity about why that might be the case, why these other regions might be more valuable to the government, it might be more important to them to hold the line and really establish a greater degree of government control at tremendous cost. If anyone who's been to Imphal in Manipur, it's one of the most militarized places, it's the most militarized place I've ever been. And it's one of the more militarized places I've heard of. It's something like, while I was there, the period I was there, it was something like a soldier for every four civilians.
Milan Vaishnav: Wow.
Kolby Hanson: So it's an intense, there's a huge cost in doing that and continuing to crack down and try to preserve the government control over these areas, especially when there's substantial appetite for an independence movement. But so I think that that gets at some of the reasons why. But the implications are the sort of inverse of both of the arguments that I've that I have made with Nagaland, which is, first of all, the movement stay relatively small in number of people joining and committed. I look when I did interviews in Nagaland. I was thinking, how much of this is nostalgia? People think “everyone was more committed in the past, everyone was better behaved, everyone was better,” whatever. And I was surprised not to hear basically any of that in Manipur, despite a pretty similar trajectory over time, except for the fact that the government has continued to crack down in Manipur. People tended to view militants, even people who had lots of reasons to complain about militants generally agreed that they were well behaved, that they were able to sort of implement. Policy changes, like there at one point there was a sort of ban on bombing in populated areas, and the groups were able to implement it successfully in ways that like I'm a little dubious in Nagaland of the ability to control soldiers quite that well. The IM has lots of organizational structures that might limit that, but some of the other groups a little bit less so. That's the sort of like who joins side and that's my sense is that's also true in Assam, although I feel work is a lot less intense there on the interviews. The other feature of this is that hardliners have maintained control over the movement. So, Assam is a really obvious case of that, right? You have ULFA, which is really intense, is really hardline, refuses to negotiate for anything short of independence, even as it loses territory and loses territory and flees farther and farther from government-controlled areas. Where they have had opposition in Assam, it has been actually fully disarming opposition. So, the pro-talk faction, rather than sort of mobilize as a moderate armed group, has mobilized as a political group, calling themselves ULFA, and with many former members of ULFA, but as a sort of not putting themselves in harm's way in armed opposition to government. In Manipur, you have a fairly similar dynamic, except for the fact that there are lots of hardline factions. So, a lot of the UNLF and the KYKL and a number of other groups, they're all relatively have maintained sort of hardline approaches of we are here for penance and that's it. And not a lot of moderate alternatives presenting themselves, basically none. Where you have seen groups shift or act differently, it's actually the collapse of one of the groups, the KCP broke down and essentially fractured basically because they had been completely defeated as a military force. And so rather than having this sort of... The opposition increases and becomes more moderate, or the militants increase and become more moderate. You've got the militant being increasingly pushed back and pushed back and pushed back at fairly big cost to the government. And so, the counterfactual then is like a lot of expense to maintain what looks more like a government victory.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, I guess, you know, one way to kind of end this conversation is to sort of try to pick up on this theme of kind of, you know, within groups, you have these tensions between hardliners and more moderate factions. And in the conclusion of your book, when you're talking about the kind of, you know... Divergent goals that some people might have within these armed groups. You bring up an example I wasn't expecting to see. I thought it was a really provocative one, which was January 6th and the insurrection that we saw at the U.S. Capitol. And on one level, it seems disconnected from your case studies, but there are aspects of your argument that could shed light on some the dynamics at play. Tell us a little bit about that.
Kolby Hanson: January 6th, I felt the most puzzling thing about it, was that it was simultaneously a professional and an amateur event, that you had clearly a core group of members of militias or members of other groups that have not just more extreme anti-government goals, or at least anti- a certain type of US government goals, but a lot of professional training, people that have joined specifically because they're comfortable with more active opposition to the government, but also a lot people that thought they were there for a protest and the violence that was carried out was not incidental, but not sort of pre-planned or pre-prepared.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, just to quote a line when you describe this, you say, you know, on the one hand, you have these heavily armed ideologues, right? And then you have disorganized, often oafish behavior by fair weather insurrectionists. I like that description.
Kolby Hanson: My understanding of what's going on here is something akin to the first mechanism that I was talking through which is the types of people who are willing to step up if they think the government is going to tolerate their behavior are quite different from the people who step up if they the government is going to come hard down on them. So, Bob Pape and his colleagues at Chicago have a good documentation of this, of other violent or illegal acts by right wing political groups have typically been overwhelmingly members of right wing militias or other sort of professional, professional in the sense of like committed, right wing uh political operators that are comfortable with being cracked down upon because they understood that these activities are illegal they understood they're violent. In the case of the U.S. Capitol, the defenses in court of most of the contributors to the March on the Capitol was they thought the government was comfortable with them being there. That comments by the president made them feel that they were being invited in some sense. And so, they didn't think that the government was going to come down hard on them and they were genuinely surprised when Capitol Police were stopping them, were genuinely surprised when Capitol police were using force to try to prevent them from marching on the Capitol. And what that suggests is this, if toleration is happening, you get a very different mix of people. You get a larger mix of people and people who are a little bit more fair weather. And I really enjoyed on the live CNN broadcast, Anderson Cooper had this line, I'm going to misquote it, but it's something along the lines of, the thing that's disturbing to me is that these people are going to go back to the Hilton Garden Inn they are staying at and have drinks and talk about how wonderful the day they had the Capitol was. And what he's saying there, I think it gets misunderstood as a sort of classist criticism, which maybe the Hilton Garden Inn is low class to other people, it's not to me. But what I understood that was is actually a pretty astute comment about the types of people who come out and oppose the state when they think the state is willing to tolerate some of that behavior. And those people are not particularly disciplined, those people are not particularly committed, they're probably actually not going to carry out a significant amount of violence if they think that they're going to be opposed. And that's to some degree masking this other group of more hardcore, hardcore rioters. And so that odd dynamic, I think, is actually pretty analogous to the situation that I'm observing in Nagaland, which is like when the government is open to the toleration of armed groups, the non-hardcore people come out too, and those people might not be particularly disciplined and those people may not be particularly willing to endure hard times if hard times come in the future, and it sort of preserves this weird, ambiguous relationship with the state.
Milan Vaishnav: I think this is an all-time first. I don't think there's ever been a mention of a Hilton Garden Inn on a Grand Tamasha podcast, so you're breaking new ground. You also, it seems to me, missed a great opportunity to ask Anderson Cooper to blurb your book, Kolby.
Kolby Hanson: That's true.
Milan Vaishnav: Well, that may save that for book number two. My guest on the show this week is Kolby Hanson. He's an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University. He's an expert on civil wars, armed organizations, experimental methods, game theory, South and Southeast Asia. He's also the author of a brand new book called Ordinary Rebels, Rank-and- File Militants Between War and Peace. Kolby, it was such a pleasure. Just a fascinating book, incredible fieldwork, innovative methods. Just a real pleasure to read and to have you on the show.
Kolby Hanson: Thanks so much.
