Coethnic Counterinsurgents: Explaining Variation in Ethnic Recruitment for Counterinsurgency and Conflict Outcomes
Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Wilkinson, Steven
Abstract
Why do states sometimes employ coethnics – soldiers or militia members who share the ethnicity of the insurgents – as counterinsurgents in response to some conflicts, but rely on ethnic outgroups in others? Does such recruitment affect conflict outcomes? How do colonial security institutions constrain post-colonial states’ responses to insurgency? In answering these questions, 'Coethnic Counterinsurgents' contributes to a deeper understanding of ethnicity and state security strategy in the shadow of ongoing insurgency. The political violence literature catalogues a “wartime coethnicity advantage”, but takes states’ use of coethnics vs ethnic outgroups for counterinsurgency as a given, without considering the underlying causes of variation in their use. This focus on outcomes of coethnic recruitment neglects the possibility that states’ ethnic recruiting patterns are strategic choices that are themselves a function of ongoing conflict dynamics. To address these gaps, this dissertation makes three main arguments. In response to these enduring questions, I make three main arguments. First, I show that states make strategic choices about the ethnicity of their counterinsurgent personnel. I demonstrate that states manipulate troop placement and weapon access depending on strategic and domestic considerations. These recruitment choices, in turn systematically affect conflict outcomes. Second, in order to account for this variation in recruitment – i.e., the conditions under which states employ coethnics, ethnic outgroups, or a mix of the two – it develops a theory of state-coethnic collaboration in wartime. The resulting typology shows that state-insurgent interactions determine the level of threat states perceive, which in turn shapes the ethnic composition of counterinsurgent forces in conflict. Finally, it posits that the ability of different states to adapt their security responses to domestic insurgencies is constrained by (a) the strength of the state’s coercive apparatus and (b) the legacies of colonial and post-independence conflict experience in particular countries. Taken together, the project challenges conventional notions of ethnicity – that emphasize it is as a ‘sticky’ or reliable predictor of individual behavior – in favor of a more fluid construction of the concept that is adaptable in conflict settings. In making these claims, the dissertation deploys a variety of empirical methods, including qualitative fieldwork, archival research, counterfactual analysis, cross-national quantitative analysis, and comparative historical analysis. At the cross-national level, it finds that coethnic counterinsurgent employment is associated with more frequent state victories, but that these results are endogenous to underlying wartime dynamics, because states are systematically more likely to deploy coethnics when they perceive lower levels of threat. At the within-conflict level, it analyzes parallels between ethnic counterinsurgency strategies in colonial and post-colonial contexts (in the case of Burma/ Myanmar), and traces changes in states’ recruiting over the course of a single insurgency (in Punjab, India). Together, these empirical tests lend credence to my theory’s central claim: that states adapt the ethnicity of their counterinsurgent personnel as the level of threat they perceive from insurgent groups changes. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the broad ideas of the dissertation. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the strategic engineering of counterinsurgent personnel is a broader phenomenon that has persisted cross-nationally in various regions through their colonial and post-colonial phases. It uses archival data – from cross-national colonial cases in the British/ French Empire and post-colonial contexts in the Middle East – to show that states systematically manipulate troop placement and weapon access depending on strategic, domestic considerations. Based on these observations, it lays out the enduring puzzle: if coethnics increase the success of counterinsurgency as the political violence literature suggests, why is there any variation in their recruitment? Chapter 3 surveys the state of the existing literature and develops a theory of state-coethnic collaboration in wartime. The theory posits that state-insurgent interactions determine the level of threat states perceive, which in turn shapes the ethnic composition of counterinsurgent forces in conflict. The remaining chapters undertake various empirical tests of whether this theory explains variation in the ethnic composition of counterinsurgents at the cross-national and within-conflict levels. Chapter 4 considers quantitative, cross-national data to find that coethnics perform better on average in counterinsurgency tasks, but states with stronger coercive apparatuses and weaker insurgencies are more likely to hire coethnics in the first place. Chapter 5 considers ethnic recruiting in the case of the insurgency in Punjab, India. In line with theoretical expectations, it finds that the Indian state initially followed a mixed-ethnic recruiting strategy. Over time, however, increasing insurgent fractionalization reduced the state’s perceived threat level, allowing it to use extensive local, coethnic counterinsurgent forces across the security apparatus to prevail in a brutal war of attrition. Chapter 6 analyzes the case of Burma/ Myanmar and investigates the impact that colonial security institutions have had on post-colonial security policy in response to internal challenges. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes by laying out the contributions of the dissertation and the research agenda emerging from its claims.
Recommended Citation
Kaur, Dipin, "Coethnic Counterinsurgents: Explaining Variation in Ethnic Recruitment for Counterinsurgency and Conflict Outcomes" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 722.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/722
