Contributed articles presented at the Seminar on Ethnic Issues, Secularism, and Conflict Resolution in North-East India held at Shillong during 25-26 April, 2001.

The book is a very detailed work on the relationship between movements for autonomy by indigenous peoples (the so-called ‘tribes’) and violence in Assam, in northeast India. The book addresses some of the reasons for the failure of ethnic conflict management and for the frequent emergence of violence in the region. In particular, the historical description of movements by the Dimasas, Misings and Bodos is well compiled and provides a good summary for the readers. At the same time, the work offers a good understanding of ethnic violence in contemporary India. The volume offers some new research data based on comparative analysis of different trajectories followed by three important movements among Assam’s ethnic minorities. While the pieces of the argument are based on the existing literature on ethnic violence and contentious politics, they are effectively connected to materials drawn from northeast India. Furthermore, the book raises significant concerns on the debates on crafting of decentralised institutions and executive opportunities that may facilitate ethnic accommodation thereby reducing the likelihood of such groups to pursue their goals through channels that are radical or extreme.

The media has a close relationship with socio-cultural and political systems in today’s society. This relationship both offers the potential to tackle the various challenges associated with inequality and, at the same time, creates a nexus with the elite classes of society to keep the marginalized away from the mainstream. This complex relationship between the media, state and the marginalized becomes more complex and interesting in the Indian context, where we find diversity not only in groups and communities, but also in power-relations. This book, containing twenty-one chapters and an editorial introduction, thus, deals with Indian perspectives in relation to the media, the state and the marginalized sections of society. This book will be of interest to academics, scholars and students of social sciences, especially in the fields of media studies, political science and sociology. It will also be useful for the people working in the media industry.

Insurgency in India’s Northeast provides a systematic analysis of every major secessionist group and insurgency in the region within a unified and original explanatory framework, focusing primarily on the postcolonial period. This book presents a parsimonious analytic narrative involving a rich sequential account of the historical evolution of Mizo, Naga, Meitei, and "ethnic Assamese" identities from precolonial to colonial to postcolonial times. Avoiding essentialist or primordialist arguments, the chapters in the book demonstrate how ethnic/(sub)national identities are dynamic and malleable phenomenon, not immutable natural givens. In particular, it argues that the postcolonial Indian state has attempted to integrate these ethnic/sub-state national groups into the Indian Union through a combination of democratic accommodation/consociationalism and hegemonic/violent control, strategically designed to encapsulate their evolving (sub) national identities into the overarching state-sponsored Indian nationality. Through this book, readers will gain a rich understanding of the dynamics of ethnicity/ nationality and the nation/state-building process in postcolonial India. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of Asian studies, ethnicity, nationalism, separatism, security studies, border studies, and international relations.