Civil Wars In South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development Hardcover

Aparna Sundar

South Asia has become the site of major civil or internal wars, with both domestic and global consequences. The conflict in Kashmir, for example, continues to make headlines, while those in the Northeast and central India simmer, though relatively unnoticed. There appears to be no clear resolution to the civil war and occupation in Afghanistan, even as Nepal and Sri Lanka work out their very different post-war settlements. In Bangladesh, the war of 1971 remains a political fault line, as the events around the War Crimes Tribunal show.This volume demonstrates the importance of South Asia as a region to deepening the study of civil wars and armed conflicts and, simultaneously, illustrates how civil wars open up questions of sovereignty, citizenship and state contours. By engaging these broader theoretical debates, in a field largely dominated by security studies and comparative politics, it contributes to the study of civil wars, political sociology, anthropology and political theory.

9789351500407

English

Sage Publisher

288

Aparna Sundar is an Associate Professor at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her current research interests include armed conflict in South Asia, diasporas and conflict, labour and labour organizing, social movements, development and political ecology. Her monograph, Capitalist Transformation and Civil Society in a South Indian Fishery, is forthcoming in 2015. Nandini Sundar is Professor of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. She served as co-editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology from 2007 to 2011 and is on the board of several journals. Her publications include Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar (2007), published in Hindi as Gunda Dhur Ki Talash Mein (2009), Branching Out: Joint Forest Management in India (2001), and several edited volumes, including, most recently, Legal Grounds: Natural Resources, Identity and the Law in Jharkhand (2009). In 2010, she won the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences. Her current research interests include conflict in South Asia, counter-insurgency, inequality and democracy in India and the politics of law.

Aparna Sundar

Nandhini Sundar

[The book] offers a much-needed alternative framings and ways of considering some of South Asia’s old and more recent armed conflicts… An important contribution in terms of its embrace of an ethnographic approach to the dynamics of actually existing sovereignty, in times of conflicts and wars, perhaps the best read as offering a range of multiple and much-needed modes of analysis…an important intervention in epistemic context.This volume is probably the first work of its kind, which probes civil wars in South Asia in a comparative perspective… In this volume, the diverse experiences of civil wars in South Asia are mapped within a set of interrelationships.