Anchoring Rebellion: Ethnicity, Religion and Conflict Trajectory in South and Southeast Asia.
Ethnic groups are generally viewed by the scholarship on political violence as having a strong potential for political mobilization. Yet we observe a significant variation in the ability of the ethnic rebels to mobilize co-ethnics. What accounts for the variation in rebel mobilization across ethnic rebellions? In this book, I offer a socio-structural theory of rebellion that not only accounts for the variation in insurgent mobilization across ethnic rebellions but also outcomes of such conflicts by tracing the roots of conflict outcomes in insurgent mobilization. While the existing literature on ethnic mobilization remains focused on factors external to an ethnic group, such as repression, opportunity and institutions, my research brings attention to a factor internal to ethnic groups – structural connectivity of its population. Structural connectivity captures the relational aspect of ethnicity and encapsulates the extent to which individuals and sub-ethnic entities (families, neighborhood, clans, and tribes) are connected to each other and to the outside world. I developed a typology of ethnic groups based on their structural connectivity to account for variation in insurgent mobilization. In agrarian societies religion and ethnicity are enmeshed and that religion – through practices, institutions, and organizations – determines the structural connectivity of an ethnic group.
I also show how structural connectivity, through its effects on insurgent mobilization, determines conflict outcome around the world. The social network of an insurgent group affects conflict outcome by determining the sets of resources and constraints available to them. This project brings attention to the role of the population in shaping conflict outcome and is among the first to conduct a systematic, global test of this role using one-of-a-kind data on 166 ethnic insurgent groups across the world measuring the extent of their embeddedness in the population. It also offers a nuanced look at conflict outcomes by offering additional outcomes than traditionally studied in the literature.
This project draws upon intensive multiyear fieldwork in Northeast India focused on the Meitei, Mizo, and Naga rebellions. It employs archival records, ethnographic observations, interviews, thematic maps, and government and insurgent documents, including recruitment records. I supplement my ethnographic and archival work with a survey of over 2,268 ex-insurgents and civilians in Mizoram, a survey experiment involving over 1,143 Meitei civilians in Manipur, in-depth, structured interviews of 107 tribal elders from across nine sub-ethnic groups in Nagaland and a global dataset on social structures of ethnic groups.