Understanding South Asia’s “Ordinary Rebels”

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.