Bringing the Insurgents Back In: Early Wars in British India

Lilach Gilady and Joseph MacKay

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2015, vol. 27, issue 5, 797-817

Abstract: What role do weaker actors play in determining the outcomes of irregular wars? The literature on counterinsurgency outcomes has tended to explain weak-side victory either as a result of informational asymmetries caused by constraints on counterinsurgent forces, or as a result of suboptimal strategic choices by the state. We suggest that this underplays the role of insurgents themselves; we attempt to “bring the insurgents back in,” giving variation in insurgent polity a role in explaining their own victories and defeats. In order to do so, we focus inductively on a relatively novel pool of cases: Great Britain's wars in India from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Doing so allows us to hold the counterinsurgent side constant while evaluating variance among the insurgents themselves. We find that variance on the insurgent side is indeed significant in determining outcomes, and suggest possible reasons why this occurs.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2013.859143 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:27:y:2015:i:5:p:797-817

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2013.859143

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().