Description
Counterinsurgency campaigns typically involve the (re)assertion of state power in contested political orders, however, there have been no efforts to examine the order-making processes through which these (re)assertions are made. This paper examines the complex and multi-layered processes through which counterinsurgency campaigns buttress, modify or destabilise insurgent political orders. The paper leverages the ‘order turn’ in civil wars (Waterman and Worrall 2020) to reimagine counterinsurgency and state-building processes as forms of order-making located amongst a much wider array of rebel and other non-state ordering processes. The paper illuminates these processes using original fieldwork data from protracted counterinsurgency campaigns in India’s understudied north-eastern region of Nagaland. Initially characterised by violent efforts to impose order, Indian state approaches have opened up to a combination of deal-making, violence management and creeping forms of state-building that have enmeshed with, contested and gradually eroded particular pillars of insurgent order while reinforcing others.
