State outsourcing of violence to nonstate actors is a global practice that challenges our notions of legitimate warfare, statehood, and citizenship. It matters for counterinsurgency, civil war outcomes, the humane treatment of civilians and former combatants, and the prospects of post-conflict peace. In South Asia, the use of nonstate proxies is deeply entwined with questions of state fragility, the postcolonial social contract, and the rivalry between two nuclear powers. This book explains the origins of state-nonstate alliances in times of civil war. A new balance-of-interests framework is g ... More

State outsourcing of violence to nonstate actors is a global practice that challenges our notions of legitimate warfare, statehood, and citizenship. It matters for counterinsurgency, civil war outcomes, the humane treatment of civilians and former combatants, and the prospects of post-conflict peace. In South Asia, the use of nonstate proxies is deeply entwined with questions of state fragility, the postcolonial social contract, and the rivalry between two nuclear powers. This book explains the origins of state-nonstate alliances in times of civil war. A new balance-of-interests framework is generated through systematic fine-grained analyses of violence outsourcing by Pakistan and India in Kashmir, East Pakistan/Bangladesh, and their respective tribal belts. Central to this framework are the distribution of power inside the theater of war and varied interests of both the state and the nonstate actors. The cases drawn from Pakistan and India demonstrate how different configurations of local power and actors’ priorities result in distinct alliance patterns. The potential applicability of the balance-of-interests approach beyond South Asia is then demonstrated with analyses of Russia’s counterinsurgencies in Chechnya and Turkey’s operations against Kurdish rebels. The book builds on and contributes to the existing scholarship on civil war and counterinsurgency, in particular the burgeoning literature on militias, alliances, and South Asian security.