New Delhi, Nov. 17 -- How do non-state armed groups act when the state seeks not to crush them - but to tolerate their activities? This is the central question of a new book by political scientist Kolby Hanson, titled, Ordinary Rebels: Rank-and-File Militants between War and Peace. The book draws on a range of innovative surveys and in-depth interviews tracing four armed movements over time in northeast India and Sri Lanka. Hanson, an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, spoke about his new book on last week's episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hanson spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about what it means to be a "likely" recruit of an armed group, the complex political economy of India's northeast, and the way in which state toleration operates on a spectrum. "It's the most intense civil wars which tend to draw people's eye - think Bosnia or Syria - where the fighting is really intense, the issues really existential," explained Hanson. "But, the more I started doing work around conflicts, I was really struck by places like Nagaland which had conflicts that had not ended. They had intense periods of fighting, but there were long periods where there wasn't disarmament, settlement, or defeat. Everyone was still there." Hanson said that the more he looked across the world, the more he realised that this pattern wasn't some peculiar development in northeast India or the hills of Myanmar, but a feature of many long-standing conflicts around the world. Hanson grew curious as to how these situations persisted for so long and how it's possible that the government and militants can agree to disagree for long periods. "State toleration of armed groups is a willingness to coexist with them to some degree, to tolerate their operations, their recruitment, their patrolling territory, sometimes other things such as taxing civilians and intimidating local government officials," stated Hanson, who described how states treat armed groups along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, he placed Kashmir during periods of intense fighting or Punjab in the 1980s when the Khalistan movement raged. "This is a real, dedicated government crackdown that's basically permanent. The government's going to treat this as a mission to search and destroy at almost every moment," he explained. In the middle of the spectrum, there are containment strategies, where governments are not going to actively seek out armed groups, but they're going to make military overtures when appropriate. Hanson cited the Red Corridor and the Maoist movements over the last 10 years as an example. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one finds places like Nagaland in the 2000s where the government is willing to sign indefinite ceasefires or act as if there's an indefinite ceasefire going on. A central insight of Hanson's work is that state toleration often leads to armed groups moderating their behaviour. "You might think that, in a ceasefire, armed groups don't have any raison d'etre and, therefore, no one would want to join," he said....