About the event: Why do states draw security forces from the same social bases as insurgent groups in some conflicts, but rely on rival social outgroups in others? In identity-driven conflicts, recruiting insurgent-coethnics – personnel who share an ethnic or religious identity with insurgents – can improve access to local information, enhance state legitimacy, and enable selective violence. Yet it can also undermine discipline and cohesion within the coercive apparatus by raising the risks of defection, indiscipline, and divided loyalty. Existing scholarship has shown that such recruiting decisions can shape battlefield effectiveness and regime survival, but we know relatively little about how states decide whether to leverage or sideline personnel drawn from insurgents’ own social bases. Kaur argues that states strategically shape the ethnic composition and deployment of their security forces in response to the organizational risks that insurgent-coethnics may pose to the state’s coercive apparatus. Coethnics can be co-opted as counterinsurgents only when insurgencies are sufficiently weakened to make coethnics willing to collaborate with the state, and when the state’s coercive institutions are structured to reduce the risk of insubordinate collective action. She tests this argument through a mixed-methods design that combines within- and cross-conflict evidence from counterinsurgency campaigns in India and the British Empire. Taken together, the study shows how states manage organizational risk from internal conflict through the recruitment, reassignment, deployment, and withholding of coethnic personnel. In doing so, it demonstrates that the ethnicity of security forces is itself an ethno-political outcome shaped by wartime dynamics.

About the speaker: Dipin Kaur is an India-U.S. Security Studies Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ashoka University. Her research focuses on state strategy in the shadow of political violence, the politics of post-conflict transitions, and public opinion in polarized settings. Her book project draws on case studies from India and the British Empire to explain why states vary in their reliance on particular ethnic groups as counterinsurgents in response to conflict. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University (2022) and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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