Abstract
While in Tajikistan recently, 20 years after the end of the country’s brutal civil war, I interviewed a group of young adults in a remote, mountainous region that declared, but did not gain, independence from Tajikistan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They remember—through their parents’ stories, primarily—the indignity of losing the war, and they are bitter about President Emomali Rahmon’s decades-spanning control of the region. Every so often, there’s a flare-up of violence. It’s not difficult to see why. The region shares a long, unsecurable border with Afghanistan, across which people, arms, and opiates move freely, more or less. In the interest of reinforcing the divide between Moscow and the Muslim world, regional superpower Russia has supported Rahmon, and decommissioned Russian tanks still dot the Wakhan Valley along the border of Afghanistan. Violent conflict increasingly looks like this—”internationalized,” transnational, and difficult to control—with highly mobile people, goods, and ideas flowing from one state to another and back again.
In Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding across South Asia, authors John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa aim to better explain these dynamics of violent conflict, not only what causes the “spark” that catalyzes violence, but also what fuels that fire once it is set. This ambitious book is an important contribution to the study of intergroup conflict. It moves beyond single-case, single-mechanism, and even single-discipline explanations in pursuit of a more general theory that links micro and macro foundations to examine when, how, and why violence erupts.
The Cascades framework is predicated on a fairly simple argument: that violence cascades into future violence across organized groups, across conflicts, and across state boundaries. Broad and aiming to be maximally encompassing, the authors draw from interdisciplinary work on conflict. This leads to a remarkably complex and layered theory woven from often isolated strands of social science research on the causes of violence. Constituting the argument is a set of ten detailed propositions that address issues that are, at their core, political (e.g., militarization, deterrence), demographic (e.g., refugee movements), social (e.g., power differentials, societal cleavages), and symbolic (e.g., violent imaginaries, anomie).
The authors present evidence to support the framework in eight painstakingly and thoroughly researched case studies: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Myanmar. Across these cases, they have compiled an impressive collection of 4,000 interviews (including with 100 generals) over 50 months of fieldwork, as part of the Peacebuilding Compared project. Each case provides a context-specific test of the propositions in the Cascades framework. For example, between 2001 and 2005, international deterrence exceeded the Taliban’s defiance efforts in Afghanistan (Proposition 1). After 2005, however, the Taliban regrouped and, importantly to the authors’ core argument, no longer saw themselves as outmatched by NATO and the Taliban’s rival, the Northern Alliance. Meanwhile, in Pakistani madrassas, Taliban leaders began to diffuse jihad imagery, which, combined with NATO retreats and divides within the Afghan army, buoyed the belief that the tides were turning in their favor (Proposition 2). Building on this case study, the authors discuss the importance of violent imaginaries, arguing that “it is easier to shut down the control of territory by an armed group than it is to shut down the violence that arises from a violent imaginary it effectively promotes” (p. 461).
Transnational cases of violence emerging from Afghanistan and Pakistan are not the only cases that support the propositions—and the propositions do not limit the authors’ discussions of the cases. Process tracing through sometimes long histories of violent conflict leads to the unearthing of issues of democratic transitions (e.g., in India, p. 243), drone strikes and subsequent anti-western resentment (e.g., in Pakistan, p. 298), the war-crime cycle that seems to stem from increasing anomie (e.g., in Sri Lanka, p. 388), and feminism (e.g., in Nepal, p. 412).
What can we learn from these cases? The dynamics that led to cascading violence in South Asia, in nearly all cases, have been: (1) the relative effects of deterrence and defiance; (2) how violent (or nonviolent) imaginaries capture the public imagination; (3) the disintegration of a monopolistic, legitimate armed force; (4) the recursive cycle of increased militarization, domination, and humiliation; (5) the extremely poor living conditions of refugees that have contributed to successful targeting and recruiting within camps; (6) conditions of anomie and normlessness that allow armed groups to provide an appealing alternative (Sharia law, for instance, p. 467).
In reality, these factors are interdependent and recursive in many ways. The ability of an armed group to take strategic advantage of cleavages, fragmented states, and conditions of anomie relies on its capacity. Simultaneously, groups build more capacity as they “win” each of these micro-battles. As the Taliban erases cultural artifacts in the territories they control, they are not engaging in some barbarism that eschews logic. Rather, they are ensuring that there is a single point of not only political and economic authority, but cultural authority as well. The better they establish this authority, the easier the next “win” becomes, and so on.
Herein lies the real strength of the book. From years of fieldwork and through this complex theoretical perspective, the authors are able to make a credible argument that violence cascades not only when political and economic conditions are fragile, but also, just as importantly, where cultural and social conditions are vulnerable. These ideas are important to deepening our understanding of when, why, and how violence cascades. Indeed, American military officials have been talking about “hearts and minds” strategies (albeit unsuccessfully) since Vietnam. Yet these social and cultural factors are rarely explored in such depth.
After hundreds of pages of theory-building over a dark subject matter, the authors conclude with forward-thinking proposals for research and preventive diplomacy. The future of research is clear enough: be willing to think qualitatively about complex, non-linear processes, instead of the rigid quantitative regression-based thinking we too often use. The future of data is not so clear. The depth of the research in this book required extraordinary data collection. The authors suggest some solutions to ease this burden in the future, but the ideas of open source diplomacy and wiki-building with state authorities seem idealistic. Some mixed-methods middle ground will likely have to suffice for scholarship on violent conflict.
In the end, Cascades of Violence proves to be a valuable, well-designed, and thoroughly researched resource for social scientists across disciplines. Braithwaite and D’Costa set out on an ambitious project, and they succeed in building a new theoretical framework to understand patterns of violence. Whether the Cascades framework withstands tests from other geographic regions is still unknown, but the world has, unfortunately, plenty of potential case studies for future research.