Description
Counterinsurgency theory holds that if rebels are deprived of their extra-organisational ties with the population, their organisations risk collapse, but neglects how counterinsurgency intersects with rebel organisational politics. Works on rebel cohesion and fragmentation recognise that depending on armed group politics, state strategies of repression, accommodation, ‘decapitation’ and ‘local disembedding’ may cause a group to ‘bend like rubber’ or ‘shatter like glass’ (Staniland, 2014; Pearlman, 2011). Beyond these broad renderings of state strategies, there have been no attempts to systematically examine how specific counterinsurgency mechanisms knowingly or unknowingly intersect with the myriad of internal and external forces shaping armed group cohesion. This article begins to address these lacunae by exploring how counterinsurgents in Assam, Northeast India intentionally and unintentionally impacted the internal politics of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). Using novel data, it uncovers an array of interlinking state mechanisms, from conditionally deploying and withdrawing army operations, leveraging external social forces to weaponising cleavages generated by surrender policies during the murky years of the ‘secret killings.’ Interacting with internal and other external pressures, the article shows how these mechanisms contributed to ULFA’s fragmentation, but bore long-term consequences for state-society relations and the rule of law.
