Good books pose new questions; great books also provide new theory and new empirical evidence. Kolby Hanson’s Ordinary Rebels aspires to all three, and largely succeeds. Its core contribution is a conceptual reorientation of how scholars think about armed groups, displacing leaders from the center of analysis and installing rank-and-file militants in their place, while interrogating a near-universal assumption in the study of political violence: that the state is always and everywhere engaged in state-making and monopoly of violence. The book centers on “armed groups in the grey space between war and peace,” asking how “rank-and-file militants decide to take up arms and which leaders to follow” (pp. 3–4). The result is an original and theoretically generative work that will interest scholars of civil wars, rebel governance, and comparative politics.
The intellectual pivot on which the entire book turns is the concept of state toleration, defined as “a state’s general willingness to allow armed groups space to operate in exchange for reducing violence between state forces and militants” (p. 23). This is not mere permissiveness or incapacity; it is a deliberate, often strategic choice by incumbents to refrain from suppression, which can be provocatively framed as state unmaking rather than state-making. The reference to Max Weber is implicit but unmistakable: the ideal type of the modern state as the legitimate holder of the monopoly of violence has obscured how often incumbents deliberately limit state reach, tolerating armed rivals as an instrument of political management. The book is in productive dialogue with Paul Staniland’s 2021 Ordering Violence—of which Hanson explicitly styles his work a sequel, shifting from the causes of state–militant cooperation to its organizational consequences.
From this premise, Hanson derives two linked causal mechanisms. The first concerns recruitment: state toleration lowers the cost of joining an armed group, enabling organizations to recruit beyond their core constituencies and draw in peripheral recruits with weaker commitments and varied motives. The analytical distinction between core and peripheral recruits is among the book’s most useful conceptual innovations. Core recruits bear risks out of preexisting moral or ideological conviction; peripheral recruits join when joining is cheap. The consequence for armed organizations is a dilemma: “recruit widely and risk disloyalty down the road, or keep standards high and risk losing recruits and soldiers to rival armed groups” (p. 10). State toleration thus produces larger, better-resourced groups that are simultaneously less cohesive and less prepared for sustained conflict: a finding that cuts sharply against the common assumption that mobilization and conflict intensity move together.
The second mechanism concerns leadership selection. Under state toleration, competition for recruits produces moderate underbidding rather than extremist outbidding: rank-and-file militants and civilian supporters tend to favor more moderate faction leaders who can credibly deliver material benefits and local governance without the costs of renewed confrontation. The cumulative dynamic is compressed elegantly: “When potential recruits can take up arms without punishment, it encourages militancy but simultaneously discourages extremism” (p. 11). Toleration reshapes armed movements from the bottom up, “building trust from the inside out” (p. 10)—making them progressively more suited to coexistence with the state than to active conflict.
The analyses are developed across six chapters, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017 in four separatist regions: Nagaland, Assam, and Manipur in Northeast India, and Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. Each region represents a distinct trajectory of toleration and repression. The empirical toolkit is genuinely mixed: conjoint survey experiments with nearly 400 likely militant recruits and 100 civilian elders, and over 75 in-depth interviews with armed leaders, rank-and-file soldiers, and civilians.
Chapter 3 traces the Naga rebellion from the crackdowns of the 1990s to the ceasefires of the 2000s and 2010s, showing how toleration bolstered recruitment while undermining the screening mechanisms that had kept militant ranks ideologically coherent. Chapter 4 uses Assam and Manipur as the counterfactual: sustained crackdown keeps groups smaller and more homogeneous. Chapter 5 turns to the LTTE and the 2002 ceasefire—a hard case that tests the argument against an organization renowned for discipline and ideological rigidity. Chapters 6 through 8 shift to which groups recruits prefer to join, evaluating whether toleration generates demand for moderate leadership.
Ordinary Rebels makes several distinct contributions. Theoretically, it joins a growing literature—alongside Staniland’s (2021) Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, and Arjona’s (2016) Rebelocracy—that takes the quotidian politics of armed organizations seriously outside peak combat. Its most original move is the insistence that armed leaders’ behavior is fundamentally constrained by the aggregated decisions of ordinary soldiers and supporters. Hanson also gives conceptual precision to what scholars have often described only impressionistically as incumbent permissiveness or collusion, grounding it in a clear strategic logic. Methodologically, the conjoint design and in-depth interviews are integrated without subordinating either, modeling a coherent mixed-method strategy.
Three issues in the argument merit scrutiny. The first concerns the analogy to lootable resources. Hanson claims that state toleration functions similarly to diamonds or drugs in broadening the recruitment pool. The parallel with Weinstein’s adverse-selection logic is introduced without sufficient differentiation (Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, 2006): Weinstein’s peripheral recruits are predatory, whereas Hanson’s are merely less committed, and the moderation mechanism runs in the opposite direction. Hanson does eventually clarify this distinction in the concluding chapter, but a reader would benefit from a more explicit theoretical departure at the point where the analogy first appears.
The second concerns scope conditions. All of the book’s cases are separatist movements in the geographic and political periphery of large states: “sons of the soil” insurgencies. State toleration is credible in this context precisely because central governments have reasons to avoid full militarization of peripheral territories. It is far less obvious that the same logic would apply to insurgencies contesting control of the capital or seeking regime change, where toleration would be politically costlier and strategically riskier. The mechanisms linking toleration to recruitment breadth and leadership moderation may be scope-limited to separatist conflicts in ways the book does not fully explore.
Third, the operationalization of state toleration invites scrutiny. Hanson distinguishes toleration from mere incapacity—states that cannot suppress armed groups from those that choose not to—but the empirical boundary between the two is difficult to establish in specific cases. The case selection partially addresses this by choosing regions with demonstrably variable state capacity, yet readers will reasonably wonder whether the strategic intentionality inferred behind toleration is sometimes a post-hoc rationalization of what is, in effect, a capacity failure.
None of these issues undermines the book’s contribution. They are the productive residue of an ambitious work that opens more doors than it closes. Ordinary Rebels is a significant contribution to the study of armed organizations, state strategy, and political violence, and will be read with profit by scholars of rebel recruitment, organizational cohesion, and civil war termination. Its central insistence—ordinary militants, not just their leaders, shape the trajectory of armed movements—is empirically well-supported and theoretically generative.
