Author: pstaniland

Three human rights reports worth reading:

Human Rights Watch, 2012

Amnesty International, 2017

Fortify Rights, 2018

This is a really fascinating piece by Yogesh Joshi in War on the Rocks on the new INS Arihant, India’s first SSBN. A couple passages that jumped out at me:

“With China and Pakistan as nuclear adversaries, India confronts a unique challenge. It has to build up its nuclear capability enough to ensure that Chinese decision-makers fear it, without sending Islamabad into panic and undermining regional stability. This “Goldilocks dilemma” will be difficult to resolve, and India should not leave it to chance — especially as the United States, once South Asia’s chief crisis manager, loses both interest and influence in the region. India should reassure Pakistan by reaffirming its policy of no first use of nuclear weapons and a retaliation-only nuclear doctrine. More importantly, India should rethink its deterrence requirements vis-à-vis China.”

” Indian decision-makers must accept the reality of this modest enterprise. Rather than engaging in premature triumphalism over Arihant, India should take a page from the Chinese playbook to hide its capacities and bide its time.”

“Even after nuclear weapons have been mated with missile tubes, the military will not be in command of nuclear weapons. Any ballistic missile launch requires a two-step authorization, in which civilian authority plays a key role. Even in situations where an imminent enemy strike may be about to take out the submarine’s ballistic missiles, civilian authority will remain the sole custodian of India’s sea-based nuclear forces.”

Assam has been in the news recently, as well as the broader Northeast, as a site of protest against the recent citizenship bill passed in the Lok Sabha. These are a few works that can help situate the politics of Assam in a broader historical perspective:

Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself and Durable Disorder

Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back

BG Verghese, India’s Northeast Resurgent

Sanjoy Hazarika, Strangers of the Mist

Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil

Monirul Hussain, The Assam Movement

Deeka Meeta, Student Movements in Assam

Nani Mahanta, Confronting the State

S.K. Chaube, Hill Politics in Northeast India

This is an amazing graphic from Nurul Amin’s “The Pro-Chinese Communist Movements in Bangladesh,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1985 (p. 351). And note that the EPCP (M-L) was only one component of a much broader, highly fractious Left.

1. A new piece in International Security by Asfandyar Mir examining the different possible effects of drones, using remarkable fieldwork and new data from Pakistan.
2. Another new piece in IS by Matt Kocher, Adria Lawrence, and Nuno Monteiro, exploring the indeterminacy of nationalism as an independent variable in IR research.
3. I just came across this very fascinating, unique survey-based article in Pacific Affairs on professionalism and views of politics in the Royal Thai Army, by Punchada Sirivunnabood and Jacob Ricks. Very cool stuff.
4. Rajesh Venugopal has a nice overview of the return of Mahinda Rajapaksa in The Wire.
5. Kheder Khaddour wrote an informative (at least to a non-Syria-watcher like me) article on the status of pro-state militias in contemporary Syria for Carnegie.

I was honored to be Thanassis Cambanis’ guest on The Century Foundation’s TCF World Podcast, discussing my Lawfare piece on the limits of “liberal international order” as a concept and historical guide.

1. Ashley Tellis provides valuable background on the US-India tensions that have emerged from India’s purchase of the S-400 air defense system.
2. ThePrint gives a really fascinating historical overview of the 1967 India-China clash at Nathu La.
3. The Wire has been running a great nine-part series on the historical evolution of political violence in Bengal, both before and after colonialism. Here’s the first article. This part jumped out at me for my ongoing project on leftist insurgencies in democracies, where I’m finding much (though far from all) of the action comes in intra-left feuds and spiraling rivalries:
   “The political system – bourgeois democracy, as it was in Naxalite and Marxist parlance – was seen to be the biggest impediment to any kind of meaningful social change. Food shortages, rampant unemployment and grinding poverty – nothing seemed to matter to those in power. The young revolutionaries even began to perceive in the formation of United Front governments, where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (the parent party Naxalites had broken away from) was the dominant partner, as a betrayal of ‘the people’. To them, being part of the government meant becoming a part of that corrupt and decrepit system.”

David Smith’s report on the Pakistan Army (specifically, its Command and Staff College at Quetta) for the Wilson Center is quite a fascinating read. Check it out.

Ahsan Butt, Dann Naseemullah, and I have a new article out (currently ungated and free to the public) in the Journal of Strategic Studies, entitled “Pakistan’s Military Elite.” Here’s the abstract:

 

The paper is the culmination of several years of hand-crafted, artisanal data collection that proved both easier and far more challenging than I’d originally expected. I thought we’d get more on the personal backgrounds of the corps commanders, and less on their post-retirement activities. I plan to periodically update these data moving forward.

At the same time in Myanmar, we have seen the outrageous sentencing of two journalists to seven years in prison for accurately reporting on one of the massacres involved in the mass expulsion of the Rohingya from Rakhine state.

What is the overlap of these two topics? In today’s Asia, militaries do not directly govern (Thailand being a notable exception). But some continue to exert remarkable influence on politics, whether through access to their own revenue, formal institutional prerogatives, the lingering but unexercised threat of a coup, networks of sympathizers in the media, civilian parties, and bureaucracy, and/or parallel military institutions that plant stories, blackmail dissidents, and repress (or credibly threaten) to repress opponents. Cook’s classic book on Ruling but not Governing is now highly relevant to Asia: some militaries have been able to survive the tides of formal democratization – and technically returning to the barracks – without actually losing political power. Explaining variation in the survival of these “military enclaves” (Cook’s evocative term) is a future research question I’m excited to get into.

Aila Matanock and I have a new article out in Perspectives on Politics. It grapples with the variety of ways in which armed groups can try to involve themselves in electoral politics, aiming to build a bridge between the classical civil war literature and the study of electoral violence, party politics, and “mainstream” politics more broadly. It’s free and ungated until the end of September 2018 Here’s the abstract: