The Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) offers a rich variety of security topics and participates in seminars to interact and collaborate with leading faculty and researchers.

In this Q&A, CISAC fellow Dipin Kaur discusses how states use ethnic identity as a strategic tool in counterinsurgency, drawing on research that examines recruitment, colonial legacies, and the political tradeoffs shaping security forces during internal conflict.

Across your work, you examine how states respond to insurgencies and political violence, particularly how ethnicity, political constraints, and colonial legacies shape decisions about security forces and counterinsurgency strategies. Have you found larger patterns about ethnicity, counterinsurgency, and state power in your research? If so, what did those patterns look like?

Yes! Across my research, a recurring pattern is that security force institutions are ethno-political constructions, and states actively mobilize identity as a strategic instrument of state power when faced with internal conflict. In times of identity-driven civil war, states face competing incentives to include or sideline individuals that share an ethnic or religious identity with insurgents as soldiers into their security forces. These insurgent-linked personnel (or ‘coethnics’) may bring superior local intelligence about armed groups, enhance the legitimacy of the state, and increase the state’s operational effectiveness, but they can also erode loyalty and cohesion within the state’s ranks by increasing the risks of defection, indiscipline, mutiny, or divided loyalties. As a result, states face a dilemma: they wish to benefit from the informational benefits that insurgent-linked security personnel bring but worry that hiring them might undermine their own institutions.

My research suggests that states’ use of insurgent-coethnics depends not only on their material strength or understandings of effectiveness, but also on how insurgent organization and institutional design interact. Coethnic co-optation is most likely under two settings: when insurgencies fragment, coethnics’ incentives can shift to align with the state, and states can estimate that the probability of defection among these recruits is rather low. Alternatively, when security institutions are internally heterogenous or structured with strong in-group monitoring mechanisms for risky groups, states are better able to incorporate insurgent-coethnics under the assumption that any insubordinate actions will be adequately controlled. More broadly, this means that states only incorporate coethnics when they can flexibly manage the opportunities and risks that come with their recruitment.

Finally, my research suggests that institutional and colonial legacies matter, in that they shape post-colonial states’ menu of security force ethnic composition options, but states do not merely reproduce those legacies in wartime. Instead, they maneuver within these constraints by selectively deploying, reassigning, selectively including, or withholding insurgent-coethnic personnel. Through all my cases – of insurgencies in India and in the British Empire – I find that states constantly update their recruiting policies and reshuffle their existing forces to navigate evolving threats.

In your article Racial Politics of Colonial Governance in Countering Insurgency: Investigating Coethnic Recruitment during British Campaigns in Malaya and Cyprus you challenge the conventional focus on “winning hearts and minds” in counterinsurgency. What did you discover about how colonial recruitment strategies, rather than just battlefield tactics, shaped the outcomes of insurgencies in Malaya and Cyprus?

In this article, I found that a states’ counterinsurgency successes and failures depend not only on battlefield tactics, but on how political constraints shape the level of organizational threat and the opportunities available for coethnic cooptation. While ‘hearts and minds’ strategies often emphasize building alliances with insurgent-linked communities to increase legitimacy and gain access to intelligence, states cannot always leverage these alliances. In some contexts, populations are unwilling to collaborate with the state; in others, states themselves worry about divided loyalties and the possibility of defections. Moreover, even though hearts and minds strategies are often presented as a population-centric doctrinal approach, they are equally likely to involve intimidation, bribery, coercion, and violence.

The contrasts between two colonies falling under the same administration – the British Empire – illustrates that these opportunities depend on the dynamics of each insurgency. In Malaya, the communist insurgency drew heavily on ethnic Chinese communities. In response, even though the British officials initially relied on ethnic outgroups (such as British, Gurkha, Malay Muslim) as soldiers, they eventually undertook a large-scale campaign of population relocation and detention to sever links between insurgents and their popular support base, and to compel ethnic Chinese populations to surrender and collaborate with the state. Once recruited, Chinese personnel in police, paramilitary, and intelligence roles were typically incorporated alongside, or under the leadership of ethnic outsiders. This allowed the British to benefit from local knowledge and infiltrate insurgent networks while managing loyalty concerns.

In Cyprus, however, the situation was quite different. The EOKA-led insurgency enjoyed strong support within the Greek Cypriot community, and insurgents used intimidation and violence against those suspected of cooperating with the British. Under these conditions, recruiting Greek Cypriots into the counterinsurgency effort became both extraordinarily difficult and politically risky. As a result, British authorities increasingly relied on Turkish Cypriots and British expatriate personnel as counterinsurgents. While this strategy helped ensure loyalty in a particularly precarious setting, it undermined intelligence gathering and further alienated Greek Cypriot civilians. 

Overall, the comparison shows that the ethnic composition of counterinsurgency forces is itself a strategic choice shaped by the nature of organizational threat facing the state. As a result, conflicts in which states are able to deploy coethnics as counterinsurgents are fundamentally different than ones where they rely primarily on ethnic outgroups.

Your book project, Coethnic Counterinsurgencies, relies on a range of methods, including fieldwork interviews, archival research, and cross-national analysis/ What did each of these approaches allow you to see that a single method might have missed?

A study of the politics of counterinsurgency does not lend itself to clean causal identification because most of the dynamics of interest to me cannot be randomized. Iterating between these methods, then, became my way of answering different parts of the larger puzzle.

Starting with archival research gave me a sense of the racialized ways in which states have historically perceived of the insurgent other. While most army commanders and state politicians understood the importance of local knowledge, they often viewed ethnic groups with great suspicion. Moreover, because archives show the paper-trail of state decision-making, I was able to demonstrate that state decisions about the ethnicity of their security force personnel are far from accidental and instead shaped by tradeoffs between loyalty, control and capability. Once these decisions were taken, it was interesting to see how officials justified their choices of deployment or exclusion, and I was surprised to find that battlefield effectiveness was not always at the core of such decision-making.

My fieldwork interviews gave me a sense of the unscripted perceptions behind these policy choices. What were the within-conflict critical junctures that led state decision-makers to update their assessments of threat? How did they perceive their capacity relative to insurgents at various points in time? Did they have any experiences with loyalty or mutiny that shaped their worldview? In parallel, my conversations with former insurgents gave me a keen sense of how state overtures sowed the seeds of discord within insurgent groups. It was sobering to find that the use of coethnics as soldiers did not necessarily make violence more selective or counterinsurgency campaigns less violent.

Finally, the data analysis allowed me to step back from individual cases to investigate the extent to which my observations traveled across contexts. Looking for these broader patterns – about when states are most likely to use coethnics and how their use impacts conflict outcomes in systematic ways – allowed me to sharpen my scope conditions and gave me the opportunity to read more about contexts with which I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to engage.

In terms of success, which accomplishments are you most proud of?

In what I was warned would be an especially competitive field before I entered it, I am most proud of the friendships I have made along the way. Some of the most fulfilling parts of my academic life have come from the generosity of friends and colleagues who have served as sounding boards for even my most unrefined ideas, offered camaraderie in moments that might otherwise feel isolating, and encouraged me to ask questions beyond the boundaries of my immediate research agenda.

I have been especially fortunate that two streams of research grew out of conversations that eventually became academic collaborations: one on post-conflict dynamics and transitional justice, and another on public opinion in polarized contexts. Working with coauthors – often virtually and across wildly different time zones – has allowed me to engage with cutting-edge methods, such as experiments and survey research, and with topics I care deeply about, including the masculinities embedded in security force recruitment, that do not always fit neatly within my work on counterinsurgency.

The community at CISAC is no exception, and I am excited to build long-lasting relationships here that I hope will endure well beyond the duration of the fellowship.

What is something that people would be surprised to learn about you?

My first degree, and even my first teaching experience, were actually in music. I grew up studying Indian classical vocals and completed advanced professional training shortly before leaving for college. During my undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, I kept up the practice by teaching a student-led course on Indian classical music. I’ve been out of touch for a while now, but it’s something I hope to return to someday – perhaps once the first book is done.