Beyond Counter-Insurgency

In recent years there has been a significant reorientation in India's policy towards its Northeast region. Yet, Indian policy thinking has been insulated from the virtual intellectual revolution in the last one decade that studies armed civil conflicts and ways to manage, resolve, and transform them. This volume emphasizes the term 'rethinking', and offers new ways of understanding the conflicts and of ways to resolve them. The essays discuss wide-ranging issues which include the multilayered nature of the conflict in the Northeast, and how democratic politics and the world of armed rebellions intersect in complex ways in this region. An analysis of the Naga war and its nation-building project is discussed. How the Northeast figures in postcolonial India's national imagination; how Assamese society engages with the term 'terrorist'; and how state-society conflicts are muted in Mizoram have also been interrogated. The role of ideas in conflict transformation, and an alternative vision of development in Arunachal Pradesh are also discussed.