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