Outsourcing violence is a murky business. All sorts of states delegate violence to any number and type of agents. They are a motley crew. Along with citizens concerned about local security lapses and those coerced to join, tribal groups, former rebels, football fans, motorcycle gangs, religious zealots, ideologues, and criminals heed the call to arms. To see quite how bizarre and alarming delegation in this policy area becomes, watch Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning film The Act of Killing, which documents the anticommunist mass murderers in Indonesia in the 1960s. But for all their peculiarities, nonstate armed groups share some general characteristics, not least a penchant for a zoological nom de guerre. States let loose (night) wolves in the Crimea, cats of many colors in Sri Lanka, tigers in the Balkans and Andhra Pradesh, and seagulls in the Solomon Islands. With their implications for security, the welfare of citizens, and for our understanding of the state and its sovereign tasks, no wonder, as Yelena Biberman points out, there is a growing literature on these agents of violence and atrocity.

Gambling with Violence contributes to this literature a welcome case approach with a wealth of interview and archival material of substantial theoretical interest to political scientists. The book is mostly about counterinsurgency in South Asia, but Biberman’s field research takes her to Turkey and Russia as well. Complementing the quantitative literature, her work illustrates the value of layers of evidence on the sequence of events and the incentives at work. It is an intrepid political scientist who overcomes the obstacles and risks of field research in this challenging environment, and it is a safe bet that Biberman has tales to tell about her dissertation research and Gambling with Violence. Indeed, I would appreciate more on how she tackled the practical and ethical issues she encountered.

Existing research delineates both logistical and political incentives to outsource violence. States delegate to manage insurgencies, to coup-proof, and to eradicate or expel unwanted populations. They seek efficiency gains, to counterbalance unreliable regular forces, and to avoid the blame. Of the counterinsurgencies that Biberman examines, she writes, “When valued territory is at stake, states—be they democratic, semidemocratic, or authoritarian—take the gamble with violence by empowering nonstate actors to fight insurgency on their behalf” (p. 158). States bet on these agents as losses mount and when not making military headway. Political incentives for delegation and plausible deniability get least support in her analysis of counterinsurgency.

As for the agents, they have both extrinsic and intrinsic incentives. Pakistan’s irregulars in 1971 included rural zealots with anti-Hindu beliefs and those wanting compensation and immunity for criminal acts. Biberman describes the principal-agent problem posed by the side switching and ill-disciplined Razakars in this conflict (p. 59), while noting the state’s tolerance of violence and victim humiliation that also enriched or amused members of India’s armed group, the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, in Kashmir (p. 79) and Turkey’s village guards in Kurdish regions (p. 138). In addition to her insights about the conditions under which agents contract with the state, the theoretical implications of this material are worth exploring. What she is observing is not simply the principal’s problem of can’t control (the principal-agent problem) but also the principal’s temptation of won’t control, where the state refuses to rein in selfish agents as long as their actions contribute some tactical or strategic advantage. Principals and agents have different interests, but not necessarily conflicting ones. If the violations are exposed, the state can blame bad apples: the familiar principal-agent problem. With the murkiness of the outsourcing relationship, ill-defined lines of control, and the convenient assumption of information asymmetry, delegating to armed non-state actors is a technique that served some state officials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, for example.

Of theoretical interest to Biberman are the timing of delegation to these groups and their effectiveness. Her “balance of interests” approach suggests that militias form when regular forces are in trouble. Pakistan in 1971 used militias when “it became clear that the rebels were reclaiming the province” (p. 38). In Chhattisgarh, India called on Salwa Judum to overcome a stalemate. The same goes for Turkey and Russia: “When the local balance of power was in their favor, they worked alone. They turned to proxies when the distribution of local power was roughly equal and when they were weak vis-à-vis the rebels” (p. 130). A “last resort” argument about delegation to these groups makes sense; think of the surge in Iraq and the United States enlisting Awakening militias in response to the insurgency. Interestingly, it is a pattern that is difficult to disentangle in the global quantitative data. But the wider claim that this approach “contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on militias by considering, for the first time, the interests of both the states and the nonstate actors” (p. 158), sits oddly with the existing principal-agent literature on this topic.

The timing issue, of course, complicates the measurement of effectiveness. If these groups only get going when the going gets rough, success rates likely suffer. For Biberman, the “jury is still out on whether nonstate counterinsurgents are actually useful” (p. 5). Yet in the case narratives, it is not clear that is where she ends up. These case studies describe useful strategic contributions from the Ikhwan in Kashmir, vigilantes in Dagestan, and the gantamirovtsy and kadyrovtsy in Chechnya. For Turkey, “Kurdish Hizbullah in the cities and the village guards in the countryside helped upend the local power balance in the state’s favor. So successful were the Islamists that, by 1997, the state no longer needed them” (p. 143). Although the verdict on Salwa Judum is that they “stoked more chaos” (p. 126), the government, undeterred by a Supreme Court ruling outlawing the group for human rights violations, continued to use their fighters in other organizations. A measure of success in the principal-agent literature, at least, is contract renewal.

But for Biberman the victories are “ephemeral and incomplete,” producing “territorial control but not legitimacy or peace” (p. 164). She writes, “Nonstate allies gave states, at best, a tactical advantage, not outright victory.… East Pakistan/Bangladesh shows that nonstate allies do not necessarily help states win. Cases in which militias served as the necessary condition for military victory—in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Chechnya, and Turkish Kurdistan—are hardly poster children of peace” (p. 163). Defining policy success is surely a thorny problem. Yet given the selection issue and the principal’s military goal of defeating insurgents, four out of five wins seems pretty good odds in a gamble with violence. Biberman’s definition of success or victory, complete with peace and legitimacy, would be a high bar for conventional forces. The success of outsourcing is evaluated by the goals of the principal, but what Biberman’s work intimates is that may not be good enough for the rest of us. Armed nonstate actors, as their names suggest, are likely predators. How do we weigh, or better control, the human costs of this dark menagerie?