Paul Staniland, COSAS member and Professor of Political Science, recently published two articles on South Asia. 

In the first of the two, Staniland works with Dr. Avinash Paliwal and uses interviews and historical sources to examine patterns of Indian support and non-support for insurgencies in South Asia. The article, entitled ‘Strategy, Secrecy, and External Support for Insurgent Groups’, was published in the International Studies Quarterly, Volume 67, Issue 1. “Based on fieldwork, primary sources, and specialized secondary literature, we uncover a rich landscape of links between India and armed groups in its neighborhood,” the abstract says. 

In his second article, Staniland works with Asfandyar Mir and Tamar Mitts and uses “social media data from 2018 Pakistan to explore the murky, tacit coalition of support– particularly Pakistan Army-linked accounts from Imran Khan during the 2018 elections.” This article from the Cambridge University Press is entitled ‘Political Coalitions and Social Media: Evidence from Pakistan’. Per the article abstract: “Social media is frequently an arena of intense competition among major political actors across the world. We argue that a fruitful way of understanding this competition is as coalitions among key actors and their networks of followers. These coalitions can both advance a shared political message and target mutual rivals. Importantly, coalitions can be tacit or explicit, and they do not necessarily depend on direct state manipulation or repression, although they often do. This makes a coalitional framework particularly valuable for studying complex political environments in which online actors blend cooperation and competition.”

Congratulations, Professor Staniland, on your latest publications!