For a long time, India and China have been seen as the rising economic giants on the Asiatic mainland. Studies of the conflicts which have plagued the borderlands of India and China however have tended to only analyse individual case studies without attempting to compare and contrast the situation in these conflicts. This book compares and contrasts the situation in India’s disputed borderlands – Kashmir and the Indian north eastern states – with China’s contested borderlands – Xinjiang and Tibet. The book looks at the root causes of the conflict and how these conflicts have evolved and changed their character with the passage of time. Analysing how the countries have dealt with their territorial disputes from the 50’s till more recent times, the author shows to what extent these state policies have exacerbated the already strained situation. Using primary data collected primarily through interviews, from the people/inhabitants of these conflict zones, the book throws new light on the problem. This bottom up approach allows the people to speak and provides a different understanding of the nature of the conflict, which may very well be the way forward for long lasting peace. A comparative study of the conflicts in the contested borderlands of China and India, the book will be of interest to scholars studying Asian security studies and Asian Politics particularly and Defence and Security Studies more generally.

While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.

Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India. Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.

Borderland Cities in New India explores contemporary urban life in two cities in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change. Social and economic transformation from India's embrace of neoliberalism and globalisation, often referred to as 'new' India, has become a popular subject for academic analysis in the last decade. This is epitomised by focus on so-called 'mega-cities', reflecting a general trend in scholarship on other parts of Asia. However, far less attention has been afforded to borderland regions and to the provincial cities of 'new' India. Using ethnographic material, this book focuses on two cities in India's Northeast borderland: Aizawl and Imphal. Both cities have been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, and inter-ethnic tensions. Yet, both are also experiencing intensified flows of goods and people, rapid urban development, and expansion of Indian and foreign capital associated with the opening of the borderland west to the rest of India and east to the rest of Asia. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Despite the compelling immediacy of a 4,056 km long border, it is intriguing that when we think of India and China, we typically think of Delhi and Beijing and not locations along the shared border. The book will engage with this interesting puzzle through a critical comparative analysis of India–China relations at the subregional level. It will locate the massive state-led developmental thrust that India’s Northeast and China’s western border regions are witnessing under the rubric of the Look East policy and the Western Development Strategy respectively. As India and China reimagine their borders as bridges, what role will border regions play in the evolving foreign policy orientation? The book offers a new orientation to the study of India–China relations by bringing people back into the centre of these subregional conversations of change. The book will be of primary interest to those working on international relations, border studies, comparative regionalism and India–China relations.

This book discusses the politics of space and identity in the borderlands of northeastern India between the early 1800s and the 1930s. Critiquing contemporary post-colonial histories where this region emerges as fragments, this book sees these perspectives as continuing to be entrapped in a civilizational approach to history writing. Beginning in the pre-colonial period where it focuses on the negotiated character of state-formation during the Mughal imperium, the book then enters the space of the colonial where it looks at some of the early interventions of the East India Company. The analysis of markets as transmitters of authority highlights an important argument that the book makes. Peasantization and the introduction of the notion of the sedentary agriculturist as the productive subject also come up for a detailed discussion, along with economic change and property settlements, which are seen as important ways through which the institution of colonial legality got entrenched in the region. Underlining the interface between the political economy and practices of cultural studies, the book also explores the connections between speech, production of counter narratives of historical memory, political culture and economy, with a focus on the cultural production of a borderland identity that was marked by hyphenated existence between proto- 'Bengal' and proto- 'Assam'.