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These passages from (1) Jagath Senaratne’s book on political violence in 1977-1990 Sri Lanka (p. 146) and (2) Nandini Sundar’s new book on anti-Naxalite counterinsurgency in Bastar (p. 209) provide a lot of food for thought:

1) “evaluating conditions in the southern areas of the country in late 1989, Amnesty International reported that:

‘Violence is now so widespread that it is often difficult to establish with certainty who the agents of specific killings were – or even to identify the victims whose bodies are sometimes grossly mutilated, burned to ashes or transported long distances form the scene of arrests or abduction before being dumped” (Amnesty International (ASA 37/21/89) 1989:5).’

The confused, unstable, and dangerous situation led many to believe that the violence was random and meaningless. The imputations of randomness by some observers (mainly journalists) was a result of an inability to see the many different strands of violence: ‘The Violence’ was, in fact, a bundle composed of many separate strands of violence.”

2) this is Sundar interviewing a former policeman in Chhattisgarh:

“Me: Were all these Naxalites [people shot in Bijapur]?

Ex-policeman: Of course not. None of them were Naxalites. Sometimes an SPO would point out someone and tell us to shoot, sometimes we shot simply because the villager was running away and refused to stop when we called out. We call out in whichever language we knew – Telugu, Hindi, but the villagers didn’t understand.

Me: Did you record those deaths somewhere?

Ex-policeman: [Sounding shocked]. Our jobs would be in trouble if we did. We left the bodies in the jungles. We recorded it as an encounter only if someone was actually wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon. I personally never killed anyone, but if by chance my bullet hit anyone in an encounter, I hate to think of it.”

Two things are going on here. The first is the extraordinary difficulty of gathering clear, accurate data on patterns of violence.  I have found this in great detail on my own Sri Lanka research – even getting the Army and, now, Police fatalities data only captures a tiny amount of the overall violence, much of which didn’t involve security forces. In India, the only data I even vaguely trust is the self-reporting of their own deaths by the security forces; Drew Stommes and I are doing a lot on MHA and state police records.

Yet, as Anit Mukherjee has shown in the case of the Indian Army, even those are open to question. Press accounts are deeply problematic, since the press has limited or no reach into numerous physical and social spaces in conflict zones, self-censors or is intimidated, and/or is otherwise politicized. Talking to journalists in Kashmir and Nagaland has been revelatory on these questions.

So while there are hugely impressive micro-level events data projects ongoing that should be supported and encouraged, they are likely to be limited to a set of contexts that are well-studied and well-covered in the contemporary period or have unusually good primary documentation. That, I suspect, captures only a small, non-representative, subset of the universe of cases.

The second is Senaratne’s analytical claim that, despite these challenges, there are distinguishable logics of violence within this opaque political environment. The open question this then begs is how we can pursue these logics in the face of the first problem. I don’t have a great answer. At a minimum, I would suggest that we make sure to not equate the study of micro-level events data with the study of political violence. Aggregating up to meso- or macro-level politics may be the only tractable strategy in the cases where this is an insurmountable challenge.

Moreover, this move can offer distinctive theoretical leverage on the broader political incentives and contexts facing individuals and communities: the elite politics of national leaders, the bureaucratic politics of security institutions, the electoral politics of local political competition, etc. These tend to be taken for granted as natural, fixed features of politics in much recent literature, but they themselves are hugely variable. A turn to the micro has been enormously valuable, but I suspect we’re at a point in which disaggregation is hitting the flat of the curve in some domains. There is an opportunity to scale back up, and to bring bigger picture politics back in while retaining a sensitivity to the complexities and importance of micro-dynamics.

Jayadeva Uyangoda is an astute critical examiner of Sri Lanka’s politics. In this piece in Groundviews he offers a disquieting prognosis of the country’s current predicament:

“Particularly sad is the ways in which President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe are ruining whatever little that remains in the political potential of their yahapalanaya (’good governance’) regime. President Sirisena is doing it with a little loyalty to the constituencies that enabled him to win the presidential election in January 2015. He has been going after the mirage of establishing his leadership over the SLFP, which fought tooth and nail to defeat him at the last presidential election. The Prime Minister is doing it by deploying a deadly combination of personal arrogance, managerial incompetence and school-boyish skills for trivialising crucial issues of governance.

Meanwhile, ever since the Sri Lankan voters toppled the Rajapaska regime January last year, the possibility of the autocratic, corrupt and unrepentant combination of Rajapaksa brothers defining again the path of the country’s politics as well as the terms of political discourse is now becoming real.

In parallel and certainly more seriously, less than two years in power, the dark side of the yahapalanaya regime is getting gradually institutionalised and also increasingly exposed.

Looking at Sri Lanka’s current politics with a definite sense of unease, I detect four disquieting trends in the country’s current politics.

The first is the regime’s unchecked alienation from its own constituencies. This process has been hastened by the continuing disregard that the government’s two leaders and their ministers – actual number of the latter is anybody’s guess – demonstrate towards the mandate of reform and good governance which the electorate gave them at the presidential and parliamentary elections, held last year. The shallowness of the regime’s commitment to its own promises can no longer be concealed.

The second is the lack of political direction for the regime which both the President and the Prime Minister have failed to provide. Judging by their regular public speeches, one can only conclude that these two gentlemen do not seem to have the political and intellectual capacity even to comprehend their own failures in power. Worst, they seem to be rejoicing over, and even proud of, their inability to be self-critical.

Third is the re-emergence of the defence establishment as a key and silent player in re-shaping and undermining some crucial public policy commitments which the yahapalanayaregime made last year. If the regime change last year re-calibrated the lopsided civil-military relations in Sri Lanka in favour of some measure of democratic equilibrium, that crucial good governance trend is now halted, largely, as it seems, at the behest of the presidential secretariat.

The fourth is the increasing possibility of the Rajapaksa brothers, backed by a remobilisation of Sinhalese nationalist constituencies within both the state and in society, pushing the regime to a state of paralysis and chaos. The yahapalanaya leadership does not show any capacity, or even willingness, to counter this threat.”

Will be selected in the next week or so. This is a useful historical background and contemporary overview from Dawn of how the COAS is selected and who the current candidates are:

I’m heavily using Nehru’s Letters to Chief Ministers for my book, and occasionally I come across quotation gems. Here is one from April 1953 discussing a jaunt through the Northeast:
“these tribal people whom I like so much, even though sometimes some of them are troublesome” (Vol 3, p. 277).

It captures both Nehru’s genuine respect for and enthusiasm for the Northeast, and his perplexed reaction to their inconvenient demands for various things, both themes which carry throughout his writings on the region.

“Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it. In academic and scholarly circles, vanity is a sort of occupational disease, but precisely with the scholar, vanity–however disagreeably it may express itself–is relatively harmless; in the sense that as a rule it does not disturb scientific enterprise. With the politician the case is quite different. He works with the striving for power as an unavoidable means. Therefore, ‘power instinct,’ as is usually said, belongs indeed to his normal qualities.

The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and-often but not always identical with it–irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power.

His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (Among us, too, an ardently promoted cult seeks to glorify him.) In this, the critics of ‘power politics’ are absolutely right. From the sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this mentality, we can see what inner weakness and impotence hides behind this boastful but entirely empty gesture.

It is a product of a shoddy and superficially blase attitude towards the meaning of human conduct; and it has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.”

Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”

Below I wrote a post about how America’s militias fall into an ideological “gray zone” in the eyes of the federal security apparatus. Richard Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich provides another example of how a heavily-armed radical group can be seen as unsavory but tolerable; there is a deep ideological basis to threat perception. On Eugen von Knilling and his Bavarian People’s Party in Bavaria:
“As many moderate conservatives were to do later on, Knilling and his allies felt that the Nazis were a threat, and disliked their violence, but considered that their heart was in the right place and their idealism only needed to be used in a more productive and healthy way. So they, too, were relatively tolerant of the Nazis’ activities.” (pp. 189-190).

A campaign of school burnings is under way in Kashmir. This is not quite as simple a phenomenon as it might instinctively appear. This piece by Arif Ayaz Parrey helps us understand why. A reader may of course disagree with various of his claims, and I suspect the average Indian reader will most decidedly do so. But it’s necessary reading to make sense of contemporary Kashmir.

It’s also a reminder that Kashmir is not just a playground for media narratives from Delhi, but in fact has a lot of smart people who write smart, provocative things that deserve to be read. Indeed, one of the most striking things I’ve noticed is that many Kashmiris separatist intellectuals view the whole Indian national debate as tangential, even orthogonal, to what they view as the key political questions at stake. Too often, Kashmir is reduced to NC or PDP politicians on Barkha Dutt’s show talking about autonomy and human rights, to be chastised by security hawks and the Hindu right talking about national unity, jihad, and Pakistan. Reading what non-cable-channel Kashmiris have to say beyond these lenses is not much work, yet done surprisingly little.

Interested in the politics of the FBI? Check out:

Enemies, by Tim Weiner. A valuable pop history of the FBI’s secret intelligence activities. Any assumption you might have that the FBI has historically been an apolitical group of technocratic law enforcers will be immediately dispelled by this book.

There’s Something Happening Here, by David Cunningham. A scholarly study of the FBI’s perceptions of and responses to different radical and armed actors during the 1960s, based on extensive archival research. This book is part of the basis for my claims below about the views held by the American security apparatus of right-wing militias in the US – they need to be kept an eye on and sometimes need to be cracked down on, but are not existentially threatening or worth full-scale repression. The hard Left, by contrast, was totally baffling and perceived as deeply alien, even when not (or very lightly) armed.

Below is a simple scattergram of the correlation between the vote for the JVP in 1982’s Presidential election and the turnout level in the 1988 Presidential election. I restrict the sample to 19 primarily-Sinhalese districts, since the LTTE and IPKF throw everything off in Tamil areas. In 1982, the JVP was legal and putting huge effort into electoral mobilization, hoping to lead a leftist resurgence in Sri Lankan politics.

While acknowledging numerous caveats (small # of observations, possible confounders, low vote totals in 1982, etc.), what we see here is neither shocking nor unimportant: areas that voted for the JVP in 1982 were substantially less likely to turn out in 1988.The literature is unanimous in arguing that the JVP actively tried to suppress turnout in 1988 and 1989, so lower turnout, all else being equal, is likely to have something to do with JVP activities (r = -.6375). The relationship between 1982 UNP votes and 1988 turnout is the opposite (though it’s less powerful).

This suggests a political-spatial basis to the location of JVP’s ability to suppress voting, rather than a purely military, geographic, or some other functional logic of armed group activity in war. Which shouldn’t be shocking, but does helpfully direct us to get a better handle on the historical roots of JVP support, rather than focusing exclusively on wartime and tactical dynamics.

 

 

This Mother Jones article provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of American right-wing militias. As someone who studies militias, paramilitaries, and other armed groups, it’s worth asking how we can think about these types of actors. Another useful resource is the Southern Poverty Law Center.

First, America’s militias fall into what I refer to in published work (borrowing from Auyero) as a “gray zone” ideological space. They generally seem to be seen as undesirables in the eyes of Washington, DC – a potential problem to be monitored and whose activities need to be contained below a certain level (i.e. not doing Oklahoma City bombings), but not an existential threat to the state or nation. On the ground, it seems like some of these groups are seen by street-level Border Patrol members as more akin to business partners or even allies. They are protected from the kind of full-scale violence monopolization that a mortal enemy would face, instead living in a liminal space between enemy (the stereotypical insurgent/rebel) and friend (pro-state paramilitaries, the armed wings of ruling parties, etc) of the government.

Second, this ideological position is a mixed blessing. The ambiguities of what it means to be a patriotic militia protect it from annihilation – the militias can appeal to the symbols and language of the Constitution, claiming that seek to preserve and uphold the system rather than overthrow it. This is a key reason why large numbers of politicized men with guns are able to operate without attracting the kind of massive crackdowns that a similarly-sized/-armed group of Islamists or Communists would immediately face. Perhaps to their horror, they occupy a similar position as certain Islamist armed groups in Pakistan – unsavory, problematic, but tolerable.

Yet, like with loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, this leads them to attract lower-quality recruits – the formal state security forces are the natural place for highly motivated, educated, and skilled potential recruits seeking to preserve the republic (however, it’s worth noting that a good number of the militia members seem to be former enlisted military).

Though there is surely a lot of variation, one doesn’t get the sense that many of these recruits have articulated a clear political agenda or are able to draw on substantial political, intellectual, or economic resources. Trotskys and Kagames seem scarce. The Mother Jones article clearly identifies the potential dangers of recruiting from this kind of pool: too many unstable, poorly disciplined, and/or unsuccessful individuals who get an adrenaline kick out of playing war, too few of the committed leaders that Reno and Weinstein have identified as crucial for forging enduring rebellion in African civil wars.

Third, this is a hugely fractured movement, rife with rivalries and divisions. Such fragmentation helps militias avoid being perceived as major threats, but limits the movement’s organizational potential. There is no obvious unifying force that can turn localized pockets of discontent into a coherent armed force – depending which militia we’re talking about, these look like what I refer to in my book as fragmented or vanguard groups, with maybe a few parochial groups that draw on specific localities favorable to militia politics.

Without links to parties, social movements, or political entrepreneurs, and in the face of a coherent central security apparatus, this challenge will be enormously difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, potential remains for the various factions and micro-groups to carry out operations that could involve violence or escalation into broader conflict.

Fourth, and finally, this is a reminder that the United States has a long history of political violence: riots, lynching, militias, violent leftist radicals, the KKK, the police, ethnic cleansing, the FBI, etc are all part of American politics. Violence isn’t just something that just happens in the “developing world,” but instead has been central to the formation of our state and society. The American political “mainstream” has been defined by these struggles, and it (and the formal institutions and processes that receive so much study) are garrisoned and made possible by huge, if highly decentralized, security forces. All of this is worth far more attention than it gets.