Published on Jun 27, 2022
The Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (QMMR) section of APSA has selected Ordering Violence as the winner for the QMMR Sartori Best Book Award.
The award committee states:
In Ordering Violence, Staniland offers a new conceptual framework to broaden our understanding of state relations with armed actors: armed orders. Moving beyond a dichotomous understanding of war, he develops a typology of ways in which governments interact with domestic armed groups, ranging from alliance to total war. In doing so, he reframes how we think about the business of potentially violent politics, which encompasses a significant portion of day-to-day life in many parts of the world. He subsequently provides a theoretical argument for what drives varying government responses to armed groups, highlighting the importance of ideological agendas for both sides. To test this argument, he draws on an impressively rich understanding of South Asian political history, offering nuanced national case studies from across the region and pairing these with analysis of a new and substantial large-N dataset on armed orders. Overall, the prize committee found this book to be a remarkable example of both a thoughtful and innovative conceptual contribution and a rich theoretical argument that is rigorously tested using a mixed-method empirical approach. We commend Staniland on this substantial contribution to our substantive understanding of an important topic and expect that this book will serve as a prime methodological example for the field moving forward.