Farewell to Arms
Rumela Sen
Abstract
Abstract How do rebels give up arms and return to the political system that they once sought to overthrow? Policymakers often focus on incentives like cash and jobs to lure rebels away from extremism. From the rebels’ perspective, however, physical safety is more important than these livelihood options. Rebels quit extremist groups only when they know that they can disarm without getting killed in the process. This book shows that retiring Maoist rebels in India believe that they could lose their lives after they disarm, targeted either by enemies they made during their insurgent career or by their former comrades. However, the Indian state would lose nothing if it failed to keep its side of the bargain and protect disarmed rebels. This creates a problem of credible commitment, which, in the absence of institutional mechanisms, is addressed locally by informal exit networks that emerge from grassroots civic associations in the gray zones of state-insurgency interface. Maoist retirement is high in South India and low in the North due to emergence of two distinct types of exit networks in these two conflict locations. By showing that the type of exit network depends on local social bases of an insurgency and the ties of an insurgent organization to society, this book brings civil society into the study of insurgency in a theoretically coherent way.