Ending India's Naga Conflict

Abstract

Abstract For quite some time now, there has been an effort to settle India's Naga conflict. Instead of ordering the developments in the conventional teleological narrative of a peace process, this article looks at certain facts on the ground created by the two-decades-old cease-fire and the negotiations that have gone on for almost as long. Dismantling these transitional structures will not be easy. This existing regime of “shared sovereignty”—to use a key phrase from the negotiations as a category of practice—is based on a form of informal partnership between state and nonstate armed entities. It serves to provide the kind of protection ideally suited for economic transactions associated with the so-called informal sector economy in the region. There are affinities between this emergent order and the indirect rule regime of the British colonial era.