Beyond Counter-Insurgency : Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India

Contents: 1. Introduction/Sanjib Baruah. I. Stalemated Conflicts: What Cost?: 2. Resenting the Indian State: for a new political practice in the Northeast/Ananya Vajpeyi. 3. When was the postcolonial?: a history of policing impossible lines/Bodhisattva Kar. II. Nation and its Discontents: 4. From Lioncloth, Suits, to battle greens: politics of clothing the 'Naked Nagas'/Dolly Kikon. 5. Writing terror: men of rebellion and contemporary Assamese literature/Rakhee Kalita. 6. Narrative agency and thinking about conflicts/Nandana Dutta. III. Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion: 7. Northesat problems as a subject and object/Pradip Phanjoubam. 8. Preparing for a cohesive northeast: problems of discourse/Bhagat Oinam. 9. Agency of rioters: a study of decision-making in the Nellie Massacre, Assam, 1983/Makiko Kimura. IV. Making Peace, Making War: India's Peace Policy: 10. The Mizo exception: state-society Cohesion and institutional capability/M. Sajjad Hassan. 11. Peace sans Democracy? a study of ethnic peace accords in Northeast India/Samir Kumar Das. 12. Hills-Valley divide as a site of conflict: emerging dialogic space in Manipur/H. Khan Khan Suan. V. Breaking the Impasse: 13. Just development: a strategy for ethnic reconciliation in Tripura/Subir Bhaumik. 14. Grounds of Democratic hope in Arunachal Pradesh: emerging civic geographics and the reinvention of gender and tribal identities/Betsy taylor. 15. Rethinking Delhi's Northeast India Policy: why neither counter insurgency nor winning hearts and minds is the way forward/Bethany Lacina. References. Index.

"Northeast India has endured decades of conflicts that have kept much of the region militarized, subject to restrictions on civil rights, and economically underdeveloped. In this volume, contributors from diverse fields--ranging from the social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies, to journalism and the civil services--reflect on new ways of approaching and resolving these conflicts.

Dissatisfaction with conditions on the ground and with standard policy prescriptions is the common thread that runs through the book. The essays provide analyses of the conflicts at three levels: structural determinants like poverty and underdevelopment; the nature and politics of the postcolonial state; and the agency of multiple actors with diverse motives. The authors argue that neither a development nor a military fix can achieve peace in the region. Only concerted efforts to establish the rule of law, a system of accountability, and faith in the institutions of government can break the cycle of violence.

Conveying a sense of Northeast India's rich and vibrant public discourse, this book will be useful to all those interested in armed conflicts, the state of Indian democracy, civil liberties, and Northeast India." (jacket)