Abstract
This volume is probably the first work of its kind, which probes civil wars in South Asia in a comparative perspective. In the literature on democratisation, civil wars are described as armed conflicts within the territorial boundaries of a state, in which groups of citizens may be engaged in an armed conflict, making peace and democracy precarious. It may however also be the case that seized with the necessity of addressing the challenge to its sovereignty, the state also becomes a combatant in the conflict. The present anthology focuses attention on states of conflict in South Asia, to ask questions about the specificity of these processes in the region, in order to understand civil war and conflict more generally. It seeks to do this by ‘refracting’ them through the lens of economic development, state capacity and sovereignty.
Historically, civil wars have arisen under diverse political regimes across the region—democratic, authoritarian and monarchical—making it difficult to conclude that civil wars are products of a particular kind of regime. Irrespective of the regime they occur in, these wars make themselves manifest through common idioms and have similar consequences of mass displacement of civilian population, loss of civil liberties and exponential rise in the executive powers of the state.
An effective comparative framework looks for explanations not merely through identifying similarities and differences but by looking for relationships and interconnections within a political field. A political field is in turn seen as constituted of asymmetries of power relationships. In this volume, the diverse experiences of civil wars in South Asia are mapped within a set of interrelationships. These may be traced in the networks, interconnections and exchanges that may possibly exist among armed combatants in the region, and also to the complexities of dispersal and legitimation of power in the region, which owe their origins to the British colonial legacy.
Yet, in terms of ‘types’ of civil wars, the region has shown diversity reflecting the contexts in which specific kinds of contests and conflicts take place. The country-specific papers in the anthology, while delineating the experiences of a particular site of conflict, foreground a dimension of the field which is more emphatic for that site. A salient dimension running across the region is the contest over sovereignty. While the ‘insurgent’ population presents sovereignty as a normative claim to secure democracy and justice, the state claims sovereign power to invoke extraordinary measures in what it considers to be conditions of extreme necessity. Indeed, conflicts may assume the proportions of, and emulate the forms of ‘war’, without, however, conforming to the norms that regulate a war. In the context of India, as Sanjib Baruah has argued, the invocation of ‘disturbed areas’ in certain states of India facilitates the application of laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Such Acts provide immunity to the armed forces from any violation of the protection to citizen’s rights to life and liberty provided in the Constitution of India. Antonio Donini and Jeevan Raj Sharma augment the understanding of states of civil war by showing from their study of Nepal, the relationship that exists between international humanitarian aid and the structural basis of inequalities. In the case of Nepal, this relationship led to an incremental intensification of the conditions that sustained Maoist insurgency. An exploration of civil war in Sri Lanka in the context of liberalisation leads Rajesh Venugopal to argue that the conditions of war are also likely to lead to a curious paradox where the effect of a militarised state may be offset by market reform-driven growth and the retraction of the state. The studies of ‘localised agitations’ in Shopian and Bomai in Jammu and Kashmir by Gowhar Fazili, and the everyday dynamics of ethnic relations in Myanmar by Stephen Campbell, examine the forms that local expressions of protest take in contexts of armed conflict.
The editors of this volume—Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar—argue that the study of the state can be enhanced if it was studied in the context of war. Contemporary works on the state have studied it as an assemblage of administrative practices, focusing on its spatialisation, as a structural effect, or through the operation of capillary power which permeates the interstices of society. The editors consider it important, however, to see how state power organises itself in contexts where none of the above conditions would be applicable. Works which have traced the formation of the modern state, particularly of the period when national states were becoming the pre-eminent political organisations in western countries, have emphatically shown the relationship between state-making and war-making. While it is important to examine the paradoxical relationship between the modern state and democracy, which has different political and philosophical pedigrees, it is equally important to ask questions about the dilemmas which are faced by modern democracies because of the enduring logic of state power. If the reasons of state demand that the state deploy the vast panoply of powers at its disposal to sustain its existence, prompting it to respond to all political challenges as insurgencies, it may be useful to also see contexts of war as those of competing sovereignties, where notions of democracy are obscured, and the political imaginary of the democratic state is deferred, often interminably.