In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India

In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency is a fine-grained critique of the Naga struggle for political redemption, the state's response to it, and the social corollaries and carry-overs of protracted political conflict on everyday life. Offering an ethnographic underview, Jelle Wouters illustrates an 'insurgency complex' that reveals how embodied experiences of resistance and state aggression, violence and volatility, and struggle and suffering link together to shape social norms, animate local agitations, and complicate inter-personal and inter-tribal relations in expected and unexpected ways. The book locates the historical experiences and agency of the Naga people and relates these to ordinary villagers' perceptions, actions, and moral reasoning vis-à-vis both the Naga Movement and the state and its lucrative resources. It thus presses us to rethink our views on tribalism, conflict and ceasefire, development, corruption, and democratic politics.

Jelle J.P. Wouters studied anthropology in Amsterdam, Oxford, and Shillong. Presently he is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan. Before that, he taught at Sikkim Central University and Eberhard Karls University. Over the past years, he has done ethnographic and historical research in the Naga highlands, writing about vernacular democracy and elections, political conflict, kinship and social bonds, and social history. He has published a dozen articles on Nagaland and India's Northeast in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Studies in History, Asian Anthropology, Economic and Political Weekly, among others.