Description
For both insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, narratives functions as sense-making tool through which events can be framed to ‘structur[e] the responses of others [their] development’ (Betz 2008: 510; Johnson 2018). Yet events themselves also hold the potential to either affirm or destabilise these narratives (Dooremalen 2021), with implications for the vital linkages between conflict parties and their constituents. There have been no attempts, however, to examine the relationship between conflict events, stability, and change in these contested settings. This article mobilises Ron Krebs (2015) framework to explore change and continuity in state and rebel narratives during low-level conflict in Nagaland, India. Unlike well-studied cases of wartime strategic narratives in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, the Indo-Naga conflict sits in the volatile, murky spaces between war and peace. Twenty-five years of ceasefire have been punctuated by ebbs and flows in low-level conflict and peace talks (Waterman 2021a). This has created a dynamic and unpredictable setting in which events have brought moments of convergence or threatened to destabilise the very foundations of the state-group ‘armed order’ (Staniland 2021), making the conflict a dynamic, deeply nuanced case in which to explore the relationship between events and narratives. We leverage granular conflict event data distilled from newswire sources and the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), mapping these against an original dataset of state and rebel narratives. Analysing moments of narrative contestation, affirmation and convergence, we identify critical moments of continuity and change through the relationship between events and discourse in armed settings.
