Blog

Two of the region’s most interesting/challenging peace processes are grinding to a halt. In Nagaland, it seems like the ever-ongoing negotiations following the 2015 announcement of a deal are in deep freeze. The Nagaland Post reports that the NSCN-IM talks with RN Ravi are stalled due to the unrest in Manipur. This was always going to be an uphill process because the NSCN-IM has deep interests in including parts of Manipur in a settlement and without getting that concession, a de-mobilizing deal will be a tough sell to its social constituency (especially in the shadow of potential spoilers like the Khaplang faction). And it still has the kind of presence and fighting power that lets it avoid a de facto surrender like the 1975 Shillong Accord. Back to “armed politics” it may be, probably in the form of another protracted stretch of ceasefire.

Over in Myanmar, the situation is a bit different, in that the main fighting in the north does not involve signatories to an ongoing peace process. But the broader effort to forge some kind of encompassing national deal can only be harmed by the escalating combat, which seems to be occurring without a huge amount of international attention. The conflict in the north with the KIA, MNDAA, TNLA, and AA (the so-called “Northern Alliance”) – backed in some ambiguous ways by the UWSA – isn’t going away anytime soon. And there’s little reason for other armed groups to move forward with a deal if they can avoid it, even if they’ve already signed a ceasefire accord; trust in the tatmadaw is rarely a great idea, especially as it shows its teeth in the north.

Something I’ll return to in a future post is the complexity of negotiating peace after or during democratization – the processes of democratization may act against some of the needs of deal-making, while authoritarian legacies can create further blocks on major political change. In the meantime, however, the much-vaunted Myanmar peace process seems to be going nowhere fast, even if the “21st Century Panglong” conference concludes with gauzy rhetoric.

A great, short piece by Erica Simmons and Nicholas Ruth Smith – “Comparison with an Ethnographic Sensibility” in the new issue of PS. They grapple with how to combine ethnography with systematic comparative research. Go check it out.

 

JR Jayewardene (“JR”) was one of the major figures of Sri Lanka’s history. Here he is, in a 1980 interview with James Manor, on future Prime Minister and Sinhala-only proponent SWRD Bandaranaike in cabinet meetings during the early post-independence UNP government (Manor, The Expedient Utopian, p. 188):

“We always waited for him to have his orgasm; then we could get on with things.”

Some cases of civil war receive far more attention than others, both in academic research and policy analysis. Malaya, Northern Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam come to mind. In South Asia, Kashmir, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and bits and pieces of the Maoist and TTP insurgency have received some real attention. Even within these cases, it’s important to note that there is a huge amount of selectiveness – there is far more on Kashmiri militancy than either civil society or party politics, for instance,.

There are numerous other cases without even selective attention – they might show up without much detail in cross-national datasets or be occasionally referenced in secondary sources or get some International Crisis Group reports, but otherwise have not been the focus of sustained research. What are some of these cases that have gone missing in the study of South Asia (at least among political scientists of conflict)? In other words, where might ambitious grad students, analysts, journalists, etc direct their attention?

The JVP revolts. I’ve written a bunch on this blog about the two JVP rebellions (1971, 1987-1990), and I’m working on 2 projects involving the JVP – one just about the case, the other a broader study of revolutionary insurgencies in democracies. Ultra-radical ideology, targeting of first mainstream politics and then the security forces, efforts at grafting international ideological currents onto local politics.

Manipur. Numerous armed groups, large-scale corruption, security forces operating with little oversight from the “mainland” Indian public, porous borders, widespread extortion, inter-insurgent competition and collusion, etc. It has it all, but is very very hard to study. John Parratt has a book on its conflict, but for the most part it is simply folded into much broader overviews of the Northeast.

The 1980s-1990s Naxalites. There is some solid work on the 1967-1972 period, and then a lot of recent stuff on the post-2004 rise of the Naxalites. But the long intervening decades are substantially less studied, despite their obvious importance in explaining how a seemingly-crushed movement was able to survive and revive.

Balochistan. For unsurprising reasons (i.e. the Pakistani state/military), this is something of an empirical black hole. I don’t know how much research we will ever see on the conflict, especially historical work that can get into the weeds on past decades. Yet there have been multiple armed groups, recurrent military offensives and military governance, extensive ethnic and sectarian violence, etc in the region.

Shan State. Everything about insurgents, militias, the military, private armies, local politics (electoral and otherwise), cross-border flows of various resources, drug lords, etc. in Shan State. Full stop.

Chittagong Hills/Bangladesh more broadly. I’ve been able to find relatively little analytical work on the various insurgent groups and military operations, as well as regional political parties, Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts.

And Bangladesh in general receives far less research than India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, despite its size and the variety of political processes within it (how many political scientists studying Bangladesh – a country of 156 million people – as their main case are at top. . . . 500 political science departments or policy schools?). Armed political parties, insurgents, jihadists, and a frequently praetorian military should provide rich terrain for research.

The Indian Punjab. There have been numerous studies of the macro-politics of the Punjab conflict. But we know a shockingly small amount about the various actual insurgent groups that operated in the conflict; like Manipur and Balochistan, the fragmentation and opacity of specific organizations creates real research challenges. This seems like an area where a researcher with good contacts in the pro-Khalistan diaspora could make a real contribution.

So – go study these places!

The CIA has made available a huge number of declassified documents for searching and viewing online. It looks like an incredible resource. A few of the very many documents I plan to look at more carefully include (brief skims show both wild mispredictions and sharp insights):

• “Indira Gandhi: Strategy, Power, Plans” (1972)
• “Burma: Prospects for Reform of Ne Win’s ‘No Win’ Economic Policies” (1988)
• “Pakistan: Zia’s Position Talking Points for the DCI 19 January 1984” (1984)
• “Pakistan: Prospects for the Zia Government” (1981)
• Schultz to Reagan on how to protect US strategic in face of Pakistani nuclear program (1982)
• “The Burmese Communist Party: A Power in the Golden Triangle” (1982)
• “NIE 36/1: Prospects for the Survival of a Non-Communist Regime in Burma” (1951)
• “Sheikh Abdullah and the Kashmir Issue” (1964)
• “India’s Troubled Eastern Region” (1968)

I don’t research Indian elections, other than the violent ones, but I try to keep a close eye on north Indian politics in particular. Here are two pieces I’ve found particularly useful over the past couple weeks.

1. As the Samajwadi Party comes apart in father-son, feuding, this is Neha Dixit’s Caravan profile of the son, Akhilesh Yadav. It’s very long but well worth reading.
2. Christophe Jaffrelot argues in The Indian Express that India’s “jobless growth” will drive escalating demands for caste-based quotas, which in turn cannot actually solve the underlying political-economic problem. India risks growth without jobs, and demographic expansion without a sufficiently skilled and educated labor force. The implications for political stability over the long run are quite ominous.

The Hindu has its Year in Review overviews of different topics for 2016. Suhasini Haider’s piece on Indian diplomacy makes the point that India is moving away from multilateralism toward bilateralism as Modi tries to position India is a very uncertain international environment. This is not a vague move; it is quite explicit:”“Global blocs and alliances are less relevant today and the world is moving towards a loosely arranged order,” said Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar in an address to the press this year” (from the article).

2016 and, I suspect, 2017 strike me as showing the further fracturing of an international order that many international relations scholars, particularly those emerging from the liberal institutionalist tradition, viewed as inextricably moving toward ever greater institutionalization and “rules-based” governance. Something that I think many of these scholars missed is how deeply this order did not appear particularly “rules-based” to rising , non-Western powers like India. They have had incentives to engage with, and try to benefit from, this order, but view it as stacked against them from its very origins – a way to keep the US, Europe, and other American allies on top, articulated through hypocritical rhetoric and gauzy self-regard. Now as American and European power declines amid domestic political chaos in both, it should be no surprise that the rising powers will try to substantially shift which institutions matter and how they work. The seemingly-natural, obvious world of the 1990s, and the intellectual projects it fostered, are collapsing around us.

I don’t know if this blindness to the profound fragility of the 1990s-style order was because of institutionalist scholars’ deep normative commitment to a vision of an institutionalized world operating through robust organizations, or because most American IR scholars don’t spend much (any?) time doing research outside of America. Either way, it strikes me as a good reason to get out and talk to scholars, analysts, policymakers, and everyday citizens in other countries, read their work, and try to see the world through the eyes of others.  What seems like a straightforward, technocratic, functional solution to people sitting in Princeton, DC, and Chicago often seems like a form of obviously distributional conflict to those in Delhi or Beijing.

From C.A. Chandraprema’s book on the second JVP revolt, discussing the JVP’s use of coerced demonstrations in 1989, which were often be fired upon by security forces (p. 279):
“The JVP cadres who ordered the villagers out, however never went in front but always stayed in the rear so that they would not get killed in the forces did open fire. . . . the logic behind this was that the patriots had a duty to live in order to fulfil [sic] the great task of national liberation and could not afford to take unnecessary risks”

This by Bertil Lintner in The Irrawaddy. An interesting note on how to sort through claims of violence and abuse emanating from murky conflict zones (and Mathieson is no shill for the Burma Army. . .):

“Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has released genuine pictures of villages that have been burned down in Arakan State and other confirmed reports of abuses, has had to be careful to sort fact from fiction. According to David Mathieson, who has covered human rights abuses for HRW for 15 years, said many photos and videos they had been sent were “crude fakes.” By doing so, some Rohingya-support groups are actually undermining the work of internationally-recognized human rights organizations such as HRW. “One bad set of reporting gives the government ammunition to smear serious rights reporting and discredit professional reports,” said Mathieson. “It also shows that social media can be misused as a platform for transmitting information of complex human rights issues and users should automatically question every report and image instead of immediately posting anguish and invective. Too often people feed off their emotions during crises, and don’t rely on balanced reporting.””

 

I don’t know what to make of the surging violence in Rakhine/Arakan state, and I’m no expert on that area. The conflict seems shrouded in opacity and dubious government claims, against a backdrop of sustained human rights abuses. All of which is to say, I don’t have any way to know if this new International Crisis Group piece in Time is right or not, but I found it very informative:

“The group refers to itself as Harakah al-Yaqin, or Faith Movement in Arabic. It was established following the 2012 deadly riots between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012, which killed some 200 people and displaced over 120,000, almost all of them Muslim. Most have long been denied citizenship and face draconian restrictions on freedom of movement — limiting their access to government services and jobs.

This new armed group is overseen by a committee of Rohingya émigrés based in Mecca. . . .

Though there have been some small insurgent groups in recent decades, mostly based out of Bangladesh, in Burma — which is officially called Myanmar — the Rohingya have never been a radicalized population, and the majority have eschewed violence, seeing it as counterproductive to improving their lot. But impoverished and oppressed, they struggle to survive and have little hope for their future; over the past year, the sense of desperation has been increasing. The fact that more people in northern Arakan are now embracing violence reflects deep policy failures over many years, rather than any sort of inevitability.”