Farewell to Arms

Book excerpt: "How do rebels give up arms and return to the same political processes that they had once sought to overthrow? The question of weaning rebels away from extremist groups is highly significant in the context of counterinsurgency as well as pacification of insurgencies. Existing explanations focus mostly on state capacity, counterinsurgency operations, or on socioeconomic development. This book, drawing primarily on several rounds of interviews with Maoist rebels as well as other stakeholders in conflict zones, shows that from the rebel's perspective, what is of paramount importance in whether or not they quit extremism is the ease with which they can exit and lay down their arms without getting killed in the process. This fear is further exacerbated by the belief that while they could lose their lives, the Indian state, they believed, would lose nothing even if it failed to protect retired rebels and keep its side of the bargain. This created a problem of credible commitment, which, in the absence of institutional mechanisms, is addressed locally by informal exit networks that grow out of grassroots civic associations in the gray zones of democracy-insurgency interface. The book shows that a lot of Maoist rebels quit in the South of India because robust and harmonic exit networks in the South resolve the problem of credible commitment locally and create conditions for safety and reintegration of former Maoists. In the North, on the other hand, very few rebels quit the same insurgent organization during the same time because scrawny, discordant exit networks in the North exacerbate rebels' fear, discouraging retirement and impeding reintegration. This book also highlights how the various steps in the process of disengagement from extremism are linked more fundamentally to the nature of societal linkages between insurgencies and society, thereby bringing civil society into the study of insurgency in a theoretically coherent way"--