This volume offers new ways of understanding conflicts in Northeast India, and the means to resolve them. The chapters discuss how democratic politics and the world of armed rebellions intersect in complex ways in this region.

1: Introduction (Sanjib Baruah); Part I: Stalemated Conflicts: What Cost?; 2: Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in the Northeast (Ananya Vajpeyi); 3: When was the Postcolonial?: A History of Policing Impossible Lines (Bodhisattva Kar); Part II: Nation and its Discontents; 4: From Loin Cloth, Suits, to Battle Greens: Politics of Clothing the 'Naked' Nagas (Dolly Kikon); 5: Writing Terror: Men of Rebellion and Contemporary Assamese Literature (Rakhee Kalita); 6: Narrative Agency and Thinking about Conflicts (Nandana Dutta); Part III: Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion; 7: Northeast Problems as a Subject and Object (Pradip Phanjoubam); 8: Preparing for a Cohesive 'Northeast': Problems of Discourse (Bhagat Oinam); 9: Agency of Rioters: A Study of Decision-Making in the Nellie Massacre, Assam, 1983 (Makiko Kimura); Part IV: Making Peace, Making War: India's Peace Policy; 10: The Mizo Exception: State-Society Cohesion and Institutional Capability (M. Sajjad Hassan); 11: Peace sans Democracy?: A Study of Ethnic Peace Accords in Northeast India (Samir Kumar Das); 12: Hills-Valley Divide as a Site of Conflict: Emerging Dialogic Space in Manipur (H. Kham Khan Suan); Part V: Breaking the Impasse; 13: Just Development: A Strategy for Ethnic Reconciliation in Tripura (Subir Bhaumik); 14: Grounds for Democratic Hope in Arunachal Pradesh (Betsy Taylor); 15: Rethinking Delhi's Northeast India Policy: Why neither Counterinsurgency nor Winning Hearts and Minds is the Way Forward (Bethany Lacina); Bibliography, Notes on Contributors, Index