Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 63, March 2018, Pages 104-115
Political Geography

Riots and rebellion: State, society and the geography of conflict in India

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.06.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Uneven state formation is responsible for differences in state-society relationships in India.

  • Different types of violence are associated with different state-society relationships.

  • Geographic variation in state power leads to different profiles of sovereignty-challenging and -neutral violence.

Abstract

This article argues that different types of politically motivated violence in South Asia are associated with different forms of governance and relationships between society and the state. This variation in local governance in turn is the product of unevenness in state formation across the political geography of India. It classifies conflict events in India in 2015 and 2016 into conceptual categories of sovereignty-neutral and sovereignty-challenging, theoretically reflecting the commonsense distinction between riots and rebellion. It presents evidence that different categories of state-society regimes at the district level are associated with different patterns of sovereignty-neutral and -challenging violence. It finds that urban-adjacent hegemonic state-society regimes are associated with high levels of sovereignty-neutral violence, revised state-society regimes with traditionally restrained state capacity are associated with high levels of sovereignty-challenging violence, and fragmented and accommodative regimes in the agrarian hinterland are associated with intermediary positions in both categories.

Section snippets

Forms of violence in india

Since independence, India has had various, sustained episodes of internal violence. The roots of some of these episodes can be traced back to practices of colonial governance. Practices of primitive accumulation and repression gave rise to peasant insurgencies, and many argue that policies that created divisions among religious communities led to the violence that preceded and accompanied Partition (Aiyar, 1995, Guha, 1983, Kennedy and Purushotham, 2012). The context of Indian independence

State capacity, state-society relations and varieties of violence

To explain the spatial dispersion of these different forms of violence across India's territory, I turn to the nature of state power and the relationship between state and social actors at the local level. Variation in the bureaucratic capacity of the state has long been an important explanatory variable in explaining variations in cross-national social and political outcomes. In the study of conflict, low state capacity has long been considered a key indicator of political disorder, because

Analysis

These regimes are conceptual types, of course, and would need to be operationalized before their explanatory power can be evaluated. To do this, I measure 628 Indian districts by the proportion of their urban population, the proportion of their tribal population, their district-level ‘GDP per capita’ and their government classification as ‘disturbed.’4

Conclusion

The study of conflict suffers from a problem of myopia when it confronts political geography. Those following the motivations, structures and practices of particular violent groups tend to concentrate on their habitus to the exclusion of areas which are peaceful or in which the character of violence is fundamentally different. Those who seek structural factors that enable violence do not concentrate on the networks and the social context that are vitally important for understanding the reasons

Conflicts of interest

I certify that I have no conflicts of interest with regard to this article.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Caitriona Dowd, Devesh Kapur, Susan Ostermann, Clionadh Raleigh, participants at a seminar at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex and three anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions.

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