SSP Wednesday Seminar with speaker Kolby Hanson, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. The talk will be broadcast live on the MIT Security Studies Program Youtube channel.

Summary/abstract: How do armed organizations change when states agree to tolerate their activities? In this book project, I investigate how government ceasefire offers have transformed the personnel and behavior of armed groups in Northeast India and Sri Lanka. The project employs innovative survey experiments among almost 400 prospective recruits in three conflict zones testing how government crackdown and ceasefire changes which groups they are willing to join under different conditions, as well as in-depth interviews of dozens of current and former militants tracing armed groups’ recruitment and activities over time. I find that, in the absence of state violence, armed groups attract more numerous but less committed recruits, and recruits flock toward more moderate factions. These dynamics help explain the seemingly contradictory behavior of armed groups in low-intensity conflicts and peripheral regions: these groups can be simultaneously larger and better resourced, less cohesive, and more open to compromise with state forces.