Biography:
Paul Staniland is a Professor of Political Science and faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations. He is the author of the award-winning book Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Cornell 2014), as well as a number of peer-reviewed articles on civil war and international security. Staniland's regional focus is South Asia, and he has done field research in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, and Singapore. He is currently working on a book on relations between governments and armed groups in post-colonial South Asia.

2023-24 Project: Great Power Rivalry and Internal Politics in Modern Asia

My book project explores when and how major power interstate competition becomes present in the internal politics of third-party states, and why the nature of this presence varies. International alignment choices are sometimes irrelevant on the home front, sometimes occupy a recurrent but fluid place in domestic politics, and in yet other circumstances tightly overlap with, and accelerate, fundamental internal political cleavages. International rivalries can be fused with internal political struggles, in ways that can foil the intentions of outside actors, generate surprising, unintended, often-violent consequences, and become captured by seemingly weak domestic players. I explore a world in which domestic factions and political cleavages are embedded within and connected to external geopolitical rivalries. Empirically, the project examines post-1945 South and Southeast Asia, mixing interview, historical, and quantitative data to explore when and how the major power rivalries of this period have refracted into the internal politics of smaller (though often still hugely important) states. A fellowship would fund two primary activities. First, I would take a trip to India and Nepal during the fall of 2023 to do interviews and gather materials on how major power competition has affected domestic politics. The primary focus would be on Nepal, a country which has spent much of the last 70 years trying to manage its relationships with China, India, and the US, with huge domestic repercussions and relevance. Second, I would use the funding to hire two research assistants to pursue a set of country cases and quantitative codings.

2019-20 Project:

India is a rising power: its rapidly growing economy, large military, and pivotal strategic location have made it a far more important international player than in decades past. Yet it is also a highly competitive democracy that faces serious poverty and numerous demands on government resources. This nascent book project explores the relationship between these domestic politics and India's foreign security policy. It investigates Indian public opinion toward foreign affairs, gathers extensive new quantitative data on when and how parties, politicians, and political movements have mobilized around foreign policy, and uses detailed case studies of specific crises and policy decisions to explore how policymakers understood their domestic incentives and constraints.