In Under the Gun, Siddiqui compellingly explains why and how political parties deploy violence by focusing on aspects of the parties in question rather than looking at individual or cross-national macrolevel analyses. She also challenges extant scholarship that contends that parties’ use of violence is primarily an artifact of weak state capacity. Instead, she argues that political and economic circumstances give rise to the incentives that parties face to maintain violence specialists either within the party or to develop ties with external specialists. The choice to employ violence is driven by a fairly straightforward assessment of costs and benefits of doing so for the party.

She limits her study to the main parties of Pakistan, all of which operate in areas of contested hegemony and partial state control. She argues that in areas where parties have a captive support base—where support for the party is relatively inelastic—voters are less likely to punish parties for using violence. This kind of environment exists where there are specific kinds of cleavages, notably ethnic cleavages in the cases she assesses. It is inadequate to find violence potentially advantageous: parties must also possess the ability to perpetrate violence. Siddiqui argues that a party's organizational structure determines whether it is capable of carryin