Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.
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