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Forthcoming: International Peacekeeping 21:4, 2014

 

INDIA’S PEACEBUILDING BETWEEN RIGHTS AND NEEDS:

TRANSFORMATION OF LOCAL CONFLICT SPHERES IN BIHAR, NORTHEAST INDIA,

AND JAMMU AND KASHMIR?

- by Sandra Pogodda1 & Daniela Huber2 -

Abstract

This paper analyses India’s internal peacebuilding approach in Bihar, Northeast India and Jammu and Kashmir

regarding its similarity with the liberal peace and its effectiveness in terms of conflict transformation. By focusing on

the human rights and needs components of Indian peacebuilding, we investigate whether state interventions have

managed to transform the local conflict spheres in their political, economic, societal and gender/family dimensions.

Drawing on fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2013,1 the paper remains sceptical about both, the novelty

and effectiveness of the Indian peacebuilding approach.

Key words: peacebuilding, human rights, needs, local conflict spheres, India

Introduction

The eruption of mass countrywide protests in the aftermath of a horrific rape case in the outskirts of

New Delhi in 2012 demonstrates how intimately human rights safeguards and political stability are

linked. Unsurprisingly, the fate of the insurgencies and separatist movement in India’s Northeast, Bihar,

and Jammu and Kashmir have also been closely linked to human rights policies on both sides – the

state and insurgent groups. In addition to human rights violations, those conflicts have been fuelled by

people’s unfulfilled material needs. In general, conflicts over self-determination are often driven by a

combination of historical, political and material factors, in which the claim for autonomy reflects the

desire to overcome political and socio-economic marginalisation simultaneously.2

                                                                                                                         1  Sandra Pogodda is a lecturer at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of 2  Daniela Huber is a researcher at the Italian International Affairs Institute.

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Despite the well-known conflation of rights and needs in post-conflict contexts, international

peacebuilding operations have been characterised as following a (neo-)liberal conception of peace,

which favours liberal rights over material needs.3 While humanitarian aid is supposed to cover drastic

emergencies in post-conflict needs, liberal peace interventions aim to create neo-liberal states in which

markets are responsible for job creation and public welfare is reduced to a minimum.4 The rise of the

BRICS countries as emerging powers on the world stage raises the question whether the liberal peace

model will be eroded over time and if so, whether there are alternative peacebuilding strategies

emerging to take its place. This paper will approach this topic from a limited, yet indicative angle. It

focuses on India’s approach towards peacebuilding and asks, whether India as an early subject of

external interference through colonialism and global governance interventions would be reluctant to

follow hegemonic models like the liberal peace. If so, however, what does India’s own brand of

peacebuilding look like and could it constitute an alternative to the failing liberal peace? This paper

investigates India’s interventions in its internal conflicts as a laboratory for the development of her own

brand of peacebuilding strategy. It studies the question of whether the Indian model diverges

significantly from the liberal peace or follows in its footsteps by focusing on the impact of India’s

internal peacebuilding strategies on local human rights and needs in the conflicts in Bihar, the

Northeast, and Jammu and Kashmir.

The paper will be structured as follows: The first part discusses the concept of rights, needs and the

liberal peace. This is followed by a general overview of the conflicts, their sources and dynamics, and

India’s peacebuilding strategies towards them. The third part scrutinises the impact of India’s

peacebuilding approach by exploring how it affects rights and needs in the local conflict sphere. It finds

that India’s peacebuilding approach does include a different developmental focus than the liberal

approach, but nonetheless remains largely faithful to the central pillars of liberal peacebuilding in its

security-heavy statebuilding strategy, and its belief in local political participation as the silver bullet in

conflict resolution. Like the liberal peacebuilding practice, it is not a tailored reaction to local rights and

needs, but in contrast has created desires and expectations that could often not be met, as well as new

fault lines and sometimes conflicts in the local social, economic, political, and gender relations/family

spheres.

Liberal Peacebuilding, Rights and Needs

Peacebuilding – as Lederach points out – requires ‘an array of processes, approaches and stages needed

to transform conflict toward more sustainable, peaceful relationships’.5 Thus peacebuilding goes

beyond short-term security fixes, but implies a long-term transformation of societies and state-society

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relations. Inspired by Immanuel Kant’s liberal peace thesis,6 the liberal peacebuilding project has mainly

concentrated on capacity building of state institutions and the promotion of democracy in the political

realm, on building a liberal market economy in the economic realm, and on strengthening civil society

in the social realm.

The liberal peace7 project as pursued by global governance institutions and many donors8 assumes that

human rights and needs in post-conflict interventions are sufficiently safeguarded through political

representation, strong security institutions, civil society and free market economies. Hence, it prioritises

the constitutional, institutional and security components of peacebuiding at the expense of the ‘civic

peace’, which is realised through local agency in pursuit of social justice and community needs in

everyday life.9 According to the concept of the liberal peace, local elections are supposed to bring about

an allocation of resources, which meets local needs, is accepted within the community and

implemented through economic policies. In practice, however, the neoliberal growth model applied in

international statebuilding operations10 renders state entities bereft of the ‘procedural and material

framework for improving need satisfaction’.11 Deprived of the means to achieve social justice and

cohesion through welfare, neoliberal states are prone to inequality-induced social unrest and political

instability.12

In liberal peace interventions human rights are supposed to be protected by reinforced state institutions

(especially the local police and municipal courts) and monitored by grassroots civil society organisations

such as human rights watchdogs. This two-pronged strategy of statebuilding and the promotion of civil

society is in practice heavily skewed towards the building up of security institutions.13 Promoting states’

capacities to enforce a negative peace without a similar investment in a domestically legitimate political,

economic and social order, however has resulted in states that have ‘lacked roots in the recipient

societies’.14 A further concern in terms of conflict transformation is liberalism’s prescriptive nature with

regard to human rights standards. In addition to promoting ‘legal rights’, which are the product of a

country’s legal development shaped by its history as well as its religious, cultural and socio-economic

context, the liberal peace also pushes for the protection of economic and ‘moral rights’.15 The latter are

enjoyed by virtue of being human and hence independent of context, history and identity.16 A catalogue

of moral rights has over time been laid down in documents such as the Geneva Convention,

constituting a body of international law with an evolving array of enforcement mechanisms.

In terms of conflict transformation the recent trend to institutionalise, internationalise and standardise

human rights regimes is a double-edged sword though. On the one hand it establishes rights safeguards

where national lawmakers are dragging their feet. Hence, the drive for ‘moral rights’ promotes global

equality in terms of human rights standards, which benefits marginalised minorities. This can help

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erode structures of domination can mitigate inequality-based conflicts. If, however, peacebuilding

interventions impose standards alien to societies or shift the societal balance of power, new conflicts

can emerge. After all, the values reflected in international human rights catalogues are the product of

drawn out societal struggles far removed in time and location from the conflict regions in which they

are now applied. Imposing these standards on other societies may unhinge the social fabric.17 Women’s

rights often constitute such moral rights, which may clash with prevalent values and social hierarchies

in conservative communities. If external support for local women’s rights movements taints local

agency as being co-opted into external political agendas though, liberal peace interventions might

negatively affect the legitimacy and effectiveness of grassroots movements.18 The conflict-ridden parts

of rural India provide rich contexts in which to study the interaction of such modernisation-driven

interventions, local rights movements and conflict transformation.

Furthermore, there is also a tension between conflict transformation and processes of transitional

justice in which international human rights norms play a central role. External intervention in processes

of transitional justice bears the potential for new conflicts, especially if it comes at the cost of local

processes of reconciliation and traditional justice.19 Inner-community reconciliation is shaped by the

dynamics of everyday life in the local societal, political, economic and gender/family sphere and can

thus take different forms. Heitmeyer has shown, for example, how ‘normalizing discourses’ which

maintain that everyday life has returned to normality can help to re-instate relations between different

ethnic groups and forestall a repeated occurrence of violence – even without tackling the root causes of

past violence.20

Even though human rights and material needs are widely acknowledged as key issues in the conflict

literature, the impact of peacebuilding initiatives on rights and needs in local life spheres remains under-

researched. Conflict-related scholarship on human rights tends to be centred on ethical dilemmas and

the question of responsibility.21 Needs, by contrast, are often discussed in terms of short-term

humanitarian intervention or with regard to development policies’ effectiveness in achieving growth.

Hence, this study focuses on the impact of peacebuilding initiatives on rights and needs in local

everyday life in conflict zones. The ‘everyday’ is indeed the central category to look at when analysing

peacebuilding initiatives, since it is in everyday life where peacebuilding is realised. It is in everyday

community interactions, where the inability of the liberal peace to respond adequately to conflict-

related issues of identity, culture, and welfare renders societies vulnerable to a renewed outbreak of

societal tensions and thus fails to generate a viable ‘everyday peace’.22 Audra Mitchell defines the

everyday as a ‘set of experiences, practices and interpretations through which people engage with the

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daily challenges of occupying, preserving, altering and sustaining the plural worlds that they occupy’.23

This elevates the ‘everyday’ from a space confined to the local, (national) or international level to a set

of practices through which diverse actors can move between these worlds.

Successful peacebuilding strategies may achieve either conflict resolution or transformation, depending

on how deeply interventions affect the conflict. Conflict resolution is regarded as a problem solving

strategy for societal problems, while conflict transformation implies a constructive change in the

relationship patterns and institutional structures at the heart of the conflict.24 Effective conflict

transformation thus has to occur in different spheres of everyday life in conflict zones, requiring

peacebuilding to impact on the political, economic, and social realm. As the subsequent analysis shows

it also affects gender relations which run through the political, economic, social and family sphere as

the foundations of a community’s social fabric at the very micro-level of society. Hence, the political,

economic, societal, and gender/family spheres will serve as distinct levels in our empirical analysis of

the impact of Indian peacebuilding initiatives on needs and rights in local conflict spheres.

This leaves us with the task of drawing a distinction between rights and needs. In the absence of a

universally agreed definition of rights or needs both concepts have been encroaching upon one

another. Scholarship on human rights has been expanding far into the economic sphere since Amartya

Sen’s seminal contributions made a convincing case for including welfare and social rights into the

human rights catalogue.25 While this idea was not new,26 traditional human rights conceptions used to

focus on political freedoms and civil liberties and accorded economic rights only within the remits of

liberalism (especially freedom of contract and property rights), excluding individuals’ rights to welfare.27

Since Gough and Doyle’s work has marked needs as a universalist concept requiring individuals’

autonomy as opposed to community autonomy, scholarship on needs has strayed into the realm of

political freedoms and civil liberties.28 Consequently, there is a conflation of terminology that allows the

interchangeable use of the terms ‘rights’ and ‘needs’.

Since this paper deals with peacebuilding, we will use definitions of rights and needs that are tailored to

issues of conflict transformation in the respective conflict contexts. In order to facilitate a clear

distinction between rights and needs, we will use the term ‘human rights’ in the traditional sense,29

focused on political freedoms, civil liberties, property rights and the freedom of contract.30 Our concept

of needs, in contrast, will centre on the material aspects of conflict transformation. By highlighting the

material needs of conflict-affected communities’ we follow Barakat’s assumption that reconciliation

requires an improvement in people’s livelihoods.31 Rather than equating needs satisfaction with

economic growth, however, we will investigate the effect of Indian development interventions on local

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communities’ life spheres and examine whether state-led peacebuilding initiatives have achieved conflict

transformation through needs-oriented policies.

The conflicts in Bihar, Northeast India, and Jammu and Kashmir

In order to ensure comparability, our three case studies (Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast)

share the following characteristics: In all cases, the Indian state has responded with heavy security

measures, resulting in extensive human rights violations that further fuelled the conflicts. In recognition

of the fragility of this negative peace – based on oppression rather than conflict resolution – the

peacebuilding strategy in all three cases has been extended to incorporate top-down governance

interventions. By examining those interventions in three conflict-ridden regions with diverse conflict

dynamics and actors we aim to cover a wide spectrum of practices that makes up the Indian

peacebuilding approach.

The conflict in Bihar has its historical roots in the colonial era during which the British administration

reinforced existing inequalities by putting the landowning class in charge of rent extractions from

tenants of different castes, while the growing caste of Dalits remained socio-economically reduced to

providing agricultural labour.32 Class struggle persisted in the colonial and post-colonial era,33 but

became ‘institutionalized’ with the formation of Naxalism in the mid-1960s, spreading throughout India

in the 1970s. The social base of Naxalism consists mainly of peasants with marginal land holdings and

to a lesser extent of middle peasants. Its struggle took various forms of action, including violence

against the land-owning classes and the security forces. The upper castes set up their own militias,

whose level of brutality increased the more the lower castes’ demands grew. Violence against women

was in particular used as an instrument of repression.34

Naxalism strives for basic socio-economic needs and political rights, including land reforms, minimum

wages, housing, protection from violence and harassment, and the right to vote.35 The movement gave

the oppressed classes a sense of empowerment, changed their self-image of vulnerability, and

challenged oppressive practices, but it failed to foster development.36 Bihar remains one of the poorest

states in India, proving that poverty ‘is both a cause and consequence of conflict’.37 In the 1990s the

conflict accelerated with outbursts of Naxalite violence, answered by massacres of the upper classes’

militias. Law enforcement agencies’ partisan intervention contributed to the Dalits’ sense of oppression

and marginalisation. While cracking down on Naxalite violence throughout the 1990s, it took a

government-led investigation until 2001 to uncover and punish the nexus between major political

parties and infamous militias. Although largely contained in Bihar, the Naxalist conflicts continue and

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have killed more than 3,000 Indians since 2008 according to the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. The

state continues to respond with severe crackdowns by the security apparatuses, including human rights

violations such as arbitrary arrests and detention, as well as torture.38

Jammu and Kashmir’s conflict began in 1947, when the British Indian Empire split into today’s

Pakistan and India and the first Indo-Pakistani war broke out over the control of Kashmir. Two further

inter-state wars followed in 1965 and 1971. In 1989, the struggle over power and autonomy shifted to

the local level when an armed insurgency broke out in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir,

pitching different groups within the religiously, caste-, ethnically, and linguistically diverse population39

against one another. The problem ‘of Kashmir’ became the problem ‘in Kashmir’,40 while the inter-state

conflict remained politically explosive.

India’s and Pakistan’s policies continue to contribute to local grievances: India has excessively

militarized the area (amounting to the highest ratio of soldiers per civilian in any part of the world)

without appropriate checks and balances, while Pakistan provides training and arms for insurgents.41

Large-scale human rights violations such as summary executions, torture, and rape as a systematic

strategy of the army as well as militant groups have been fuelling the local conflict.42 Perpetrators from

the ranks of India’s security agencies tend to escape prosecution, since the deployed army and

paramilitary forces can claim immunity under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. However,

DasGupta identifies ‘the consistent failure of the Indian state to accommodate political aspirations

within a robust democratic institutional framework in Jammu and Kashmir’ as the primary reason why

popular alienation with the Indian state morphed into an armed rebellion.43

Northeast India is a term first coined by the British colonists who developed the concept of a ‘north-

eastern frontier’.44 It consists of the ‘seven sister’ states of Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland,

Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Tripura. The diversity of the population is reflected in the fact that it

includes 75 major ethnic groups and sub-groups with 400 languages and dialects.45 Thirty percent of the

population belong to tribes.46 Haokip differentiates three faultlines in the conflict: tribals versus the

state, tribals versus non-tribals and tribals versus other tribals. Conflicts revolve around matters of

identity (such as language, ethnicity, tribal rivalry and migration), economic factors (such as control

over local resources, access to water), and political issues, most importantly a widespread feeling of

exploitation and alienation from the Indian state.47 The latter was fuelled by the state-led extraction of

natural resources, which violated environmental rights and displaced whole communities but failed to

benefit the local population.

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In the Northeast, insurgents’ assertion of identity and ethnicity are only focal points for the local

population’s grievances over its marginalisation, disfranchisement and deprivation. In the absence of

adequate physical infrastructure and access to water, an unusual increase in transnational immigration

and the subsequent competition over natural resources have been perpetuating a vicious cycle of

violence.48 Local insurgencies were met with heavy-handed security campaigns by the Indian army and

paramilitaries such as the Assam Rifles. Between 1992 and 2006, the conflict resulted in more than

16,000 casualties (52 percent of whom were civilians), in addition to the large-scale use of kidnappings,

rape and the destruction of property by the security forces as well as violent insurgent groups.49 Human

rights violations by Indian security forces often went unsanctioned by the Indian state due to the

Armed Forces Special Powers Act.50

Despite their particularities, the conflicts above show many similarities: they are fuelled by a

combustible mixture of underlying grievances ranging from economic and political marginalisation to

alienation from the state or between societal groups. In all those cases the conflicts have morphed over

time, drawing in new actors and reshaping their political agendas, which renders a clear distinction

between conflicts over identity, power and resources impossible. Hence, the Indian central government

had to develop a conflict resolution approach that spans a variety of different conflict contexts. This

presents this paper with a dilemma as well as an opportunity: Given the complexity of the conflicts in

Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast, the analysis below will not be able to cover these

conflicts in their entirety. However, by examining specific state interventions in localised manifestations

of these diverse conflicts, we will try to distil the essence of an Indian peacebuilding strategy as the

central government’s response to a wide range of local conflict issues and dynamics.

In terms of its institutional development India’s current peacebuilding strategy can be traced back to

colonial interventions and the resistance against them, revised and refined through exposure to a range

of local conflicts.51 Over time the state responses developed into a multi-pronged strategy, combining

heavy-handed security measures with the promotion of socio-economic development, statebuilding,

local participatory governance and decentralisation, as well as support for civil society. In terms of

security policy, India seeks to train and modernize the security forces, as well as to train and reintegrate

detained militants. Local political participation was enabled through the establishment of directly

elected local governance bodies - the Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs)-52 and the Autonomous Hill

Councils.53 Socio-economic peacebuilding initiatives, by contrast, range from improving local physical

and service infrastructure, to establishing a legal framework for the recording of land rights, providing

basic health care and education, connecting remote villages, land reforms, and promoting income

security. NGOs are contracted in the fields of development, health and education, in order to ensure

some degree of grassroots involvement in the execution of peacebuilding strategies. Hence, in broad

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terms the design of the Indian peacebuilding approach seems to mirror the liberal peace, even though

there is a variation from it in terms of a bigger focus on developmental strategies, as well as of

distributive measures in areas such as land reform, income security and job creation.54 A closer look

into the context-specific human rights and material needs policies in the subsequent section will

provide a more differentiated picture of the Indian peacebuilding approach and assess its impact on

conflict transformation in local spheres of everyday life.

The impact of India’s peacebuilding on local conflict spheres

In order to address the issues above, we will now concentrate on four realms of local everyday life: the

societal, political, economic, and family sphere. Our analysis is based on fieldwork in Bihar, Northeast

India, and Jammu and Kashmir, and has been conducted in the framework of an international research

consortium in 2011 and 2012.

The local soc ie ta l sphere

Contemporary International Relations scholarship tends to reduce ‘society’ to analysis of NGOs,

associations, unions and other civil society organisations (even though emerging research argues that

their role in conflict transformation is contested).55 Conflict transformation, however, views societies as

disrupted communities with inter-group rivalries over issues such as group privileges, land ownership,

resource distribution or the relationship between religion and community life (in short: conflicts

between rights and needs). In the societal sphere, conflict transformation aims to mend broken

relationships between competing groups and change violent patterns of interactions into non-violent

ones. Hence, the local societal sphere represents the primary relational dimension of conflict

transformation approaches.

Peacebuilding strategies that do not take local needs and rights into account may transform patterns of

local societal interactions, but not necessarily towards non-violence. In the societal conflict sphere

interventions are aimed at reshaping identities, power structures and redefining the underlying

relationships at the heart of the conflict, drawing in or releasing new segments of the population. In

Assam and Mizoram in India’s Northeast, for instance, the state’s heavy-handed security tactics of the

1980s and 90s have turned the masses against the state.56 Routine violations of human rights had

prompted large segments of the population to question the legitimacy of state dominance, extending

the previous conflict between insurgent groups and the state to the local society sphere.

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Furthermore, distributive and political practices which are based on essentialised narratives of a conflict

forge collective identification since special provisions (‘minority rights’, allocation of resources) are

attributed only to groupings recognised in the public discourse:57 tribes, classes, castes, religious

factions, race and ethnicity. Hence, such identities may be assumed as a cover to legitimise struggles

with or for a state. In Jammu and Kashmir, Van Beek asserts that this ‘identity fetishism’ veils the web

of actors, agendas and power relations with a simplified notion of collective resistance by religious

communities.58

In the Northeast, India has been experimenting with a peacebuilding strategy that grants certain

collective identities autonomy in the hope of easing tensions between insurgency movements and the

state. However, this strategy of ethno-politics has largely managed to change the morphology of

conflicts – addressing some dynamics of conflicts but only at the cost of introducing new dynamics –

rather than actually promoting conflict resolution or transformation. Since the new autonomy settings

allowed majority communities to reinvent structures of domination and oppression under the veil of

self-determination, conflicts moved from the state-society level to the inter-group level. In Assam’s

societal sphere new fault lines emerged when the Bodos, Dimas and Karbis were granted degrees of

self-rule, prompting minorities to press for their own autonomy in order to escape the new power

structures. Hence, the re-occurring trade-off between group autonomy and the rights of the individual

shifted conflict dynamics to a more localised level, and pushed the logic of autonomy to ‘an extreme

end where it resembles the process of peeling an onion’.59

The way out of the self-disintegrating dynamics of autonomy-based peacebuilding strategies is a new

focus on justice and equality in the local societal sphere. This requires a revision of the concept of

citizenship, away from privilege over outsiders and towards equality of rights and needs among all

members of the local political sphere. In Assam new political movements have emerged to promote

this strategy of conflict transformation.60

The local pol i t i ca l sphere

The local political sphere constitutes part of what Lederach called the ‘structural dimension’ of conflict

transformation: the space where root causes of violence are addressed through the establishment or

reform of institutions, which foster non-violent responses to conflict.61 Faced with a whole array of

developmental challenges, demands for regional self-determination and the political marginalisation of

the lower casts, scheduled tribes and women, the Indian government permitted a limited degree of self-

determination through the establishment of directly elected local governance bodies - the Panchayat Raj

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Institutions (PRIs) - and the Autonomous Hill Councils. Local elections were supposed to provide a

platform for villagers to participate in the process of decision-making and the implementation of

welfare schemes.62 In some cases, the PRIs and Autonomous Hill Councils have indeed succeeded in

creating a political space for the realisation of local rights and needs, while in other cases their

realisation has proven to be more complex.

In Bihar, the PRIs constitute an emerging ‘arena for both, generation and resolution of conflicts’.63

Naxals started to engage with the PRIs and encouraged their support base to compete for posts in

elections. The PRIs have provided sites for negotiated consensus between local elites and elected PRI

members and between Naxals, PRI representatives and state officials.64 Furthermore, in some regions

like Leh, there was a feeling that transparency and accountability had increased through the PRIs since

‘the panchayat consult people regarding their demands/needs for the development of the village’.65

Similarly, in the villages in the Jammu subdivision there appeared to be a much greater impulse to

institutionalise collective action by forming associations and confederations at the local level, which

proceeded to press the government to devolve power.66

Ladakh’s Autonomous Hill Council is another example of the successful creation of a local political

space for inner-community conflict transformation.67 In its resistance against the central state, the

Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) demanded regional autonomy by means of a Union Territory’s

status for Ladakh. However, due to the association’s social boycott of Muslims, no other religious

association supported its autonomy demands out of fear that sovereignty might result in apartheid

structures. Hence, the central government made local self-determination contingent upon the

secularization of LBA policies. This push towards more inclusive policies led to inter-factional

negotiations and eventually resulted in the creation of a Joint Coordination Committee, representing

Buddhists, Sunnis, Shias and Christians.68 Such inter-factional forums may facilitate conflict

transformation at the community-level and reinforce minority rights.

At the same time, fieldwork conducted in our project confirms that local elections can fuel conflicts if

popular expectations are raised in the process and subsequently disappointed.69 In Jammu and Kashmir

for instance, PRI elections had generated a ‘revolution of rising expectations’,70 which were dashed after

the polls. A stark discrepancy between input legitimacy (through free and fair elections) and output

legitimacy (real power of elected representatives) accompanied by distrust between and within local

communities had generated widespread frustrations with local elections. Once constitutionally

established, consecutive central governments undermined PRIs by halting not only the transfer of

promised funds but also the devolution of power from the state to the local level.71 Elections, while

free and fair, were thus seen as ‘paper work’, a ‘formality’, or even a ‘fraud’ and a ‘sham’ since the

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elected local political bodies had no resources to end people’s economic and political marginalisation.72

Expectations had been raised in TV where Sarpanches – elected heads of village - were handed cheques

creating the idea that all Sarpanches were receiving money and not distributing it, thus creating new

fault lines of distrust among community members.73 Hence, granting and exercising political rights in

itself falls short of mitigating conflicts, if newly created electoral bodies are not empowered to satisfy

needs and thereby mitigate marginalisation as a root cause of the conflict.

Furthermore, the introduction of new electoral and administrative systems ran counter to local

traditions in some places. Customary institutions that facilitated cooperation and enabled the survival of

the community were infringed upon by the abrupt introduction of the new system.74 In Leh, for

example, the traditional Goba system and with it local mechanisms for dispute resolution was

abandoned with the result that such disputes had to be taken to the courts, where judicial processes

take three to four years. Furthermore, with the introduction of the new system, responsibilities were

not always clearly defined, leading to ‘messy governance,’ corruption, and signs of possible conflict

between new and old institutions, with the latter feeling threatened about their diminishing role and

power.75

In general, as one report sums up, in the wake of local elections people:

are feeling cheated and frustrations are rising, the district authorities are feeling threatened with

the change in roles which has to come about as a result of devolution. ... A framework has been

crated through fair and free elections but the governance initiative has stopped there. There has

not been any serious attempt to make this framework meaningful by devolving funds and

functionaries. There has been no attempt at finding out what the people need and aspire for in

the aftermath of a violent conflict that has affected their lives and how this can be addressed

through local governance initiatives. Instead the trust deficit in the villages as well as between

villages in different sectors and regions of the state is widening as hopes generated by a fair and

free election are being dashed.76

At first glance it might seem paradoxical that PRI elections as an instrument to improve political rights

and equality have not only failed to achieve their very aim in many conflict regions, but have - in the

short-term – also led to new social conflicts and an increase of human rights violations. Especially in

rural areas, the upper classes have been using violence, bribery and blackmail to stop the lower castes

from exercising their democratic rights.77 Such attempts to halt the power shift in the local political

sphere of India’s most traditional regions may, however, be outweighed in the long run by the political

opportunities inherent in the PRI’s promotion of equality. In this respect it is important to note the

PRI assemblies’ role as a platform to address human rights violations in an open public space, which

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had otherwise been concealed through the collaboration of corrupt municipal institutions with the

security sector.78

The local e conomic sphere

Provided that needs are subjective and contextual, in contrast to the universalist concept of human

rights, communities have to be involved in identifying their needs. Focused on material needs, this

section scrutinises the context-sensitivity of the developmental aspects of India’s peacebuilding strategy

and investigates their impact on conflict dynamics. In terms of Lederach’s theory of conflict

transformation, economic peacebuilding initiatives may belong either to the structural dimension of

conflict transformation, or to the relational one. Structural approaches involve economic institutions,

while relational ones may be limited to development projects, which affect the relationship between

different segments of society, between individuals or between the state and individuals.

In the attempt to improve infrastructure and create employment in the construction sector, large-scale

development projects have sometimes caused new conflicts between the state and indigenous

communities. Hydroelectric projects, paper mills, dams, technology parks and other large-scale projects

have led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their lands in

Meghalaya, Tripura and Assam.79 Such development projects have violated indigenous’ land rights for

the sake of ‘modernization’ and potential profits. Even if land ownership is difficult to prove in

traditional governance systems without land title registers,80 such large-scale alienation of indigenous

tribes from their land has turned those communities against the state. Similarly, in conflicts between

communities where the state institutions backed the forcible occupation of tribal lands (such as in

Tripura’s conflict between Bengali refugees and the Sengkrak movement), the state turns into a conflict

party. ‘The battle of resources has pitted communities against the state, the army against the people,

one community against another, and in general reconstructed relations’.81 These new fault lines in

society brought about by brutal development approaches can only be mitigated through community-

internal consensus on justice and the restoration of rights to the marginalised.

Hence, the Indian central government designed a two-pronged approach to development in recognition

of the link between conflict and economic marginalisation. Firstly, local electoral institutions are

supposed to generate a community-wide consensus on development approaches and the redistribution

of resources. Secondly, the central government pursues its own policies to promote equality by

reversing historic patterns of exclusion, in particular by facilitating access to local natural resources

through land reforms, forest management and pro-tribal policies. Local PRI institutions appeared in

Indian development planning since the 10th Five Year Plan as a tool to mitigate Maoist and Naxalite

grievances over economic marginalisation.82 Some local initiatives have been successful in transforming

14    

intergroup conflicts, such as the reallocation of resources by Autonomous District Councils in

Meghalaya from non-tribals to traditionally marginalised tribal groups.  In many conflict-ridden parts of

India though, a variety of factors prevented the panchayati raj system from becoming an effective tool

in achieving socio-economic justice in the local sphere. Firstly, the members of the District Planning

and Development Board of the panchayati system are not always democratically elected and thus may

not reflect the socio-economic concerns of the general population. In Jammu and Kashmir, for

instance the board is staffed with state appointees, reflecting government strategies rather than local

notions of distributive justice.83 If local structures of governance are bypassed in economic decision-

making though, development strategies might fail to adequately reflect the underlying causes of

conflict,84 and more likely result in pacification rather than in conflict transformation. Secondly,

neoliberal economic policies at the state level may render the realisation of local notions of economic

justice impossible. ‘Vision 2020’, the long-term development strategy of the Northeast’s Ministry of

Development, for instance, envisages ‘market-friendly reforms’, tax holidays, and export promotion

parks.85 ‘Market-friendly reforms’ are tailored to reduce state interventions and thereby challenge the

approach to redistribution as such. Tax holidays and export promotion parks may additionally starve

community and district budgets of the very tax revenues needed for redistribution at the local level.

Once ‘Vision 2020’ or similar neoliberal policies are implemented, any local notions of economic justice

based on redistribution might thus be off the table. Thirdly, even where local panchayats have identified

contextual development approaches, support might not always arrive in the places most in need.

Despite audits and systems of checks and balances, corruption among local officials has halted or

significantly constrained development in some communities.86

Central policies to transform economically motivated conflicts have taken the shape of reforms of land

tenure, the introduction of minimum wages and policies designed around the needs of tribal

populations.87 While a limited effect of land reforms on national poverty levels has been statistically

proven,88 subsistence farmers as the most needy have seen only limited improvements in their standards

of living.89 More group-specific measures against class inequality, such as the Indian government’s tribal

sub-plan and joint forest management have been important starting points in addressing local economic

grievances.90 Nation-wide programmes like the minimum wage scheme, by contrast, have often

exceeded local administrative capacities.91

Local gender re lat ions – between the local pol i t i ca l and the family sphere

Conflict dynamics as well as their transformation affect social relationships not only at the macro level

of society, but reach within the most inner circles of local everyday life: the family sphere. Often

15    

overlooked in research, human rights initiatives are also affecting family dynamics and structures, which

can constitute an important space for reconciliation or further fuel conflict dynamics. In India, local

elections in which different family members had been competing led to the disintegration of families or

even family feuds after the elections. Elections were thus termed as ‘khatarnak’ (dangerous) and

‘government policy to make people fight’.92 Such cases indicate the potential social costs of realising

individuals’ right of political participation under conditions of extreme polarisation over conflict

transformation strategies.

Both, the rights and needs dimensions of the Indian peacebuilding strategy have also had a

transformative effect on gender relations in the local economic, social, and political spheres with

repercussions on the family sphere. Along with the panchayati raj system the 73rd constitutional

amendment introduced a women’s quota. One third of the seats in the newly created institutions are

reserved for women to foster gender equality in local political participation. This reservation has

facilitated women’s participation in local decision-making processes, resulting in over one million

women having become elected representatives in the three tiers of the panchayat system already in the

first decade after establishing the PRIs.93 More importantly, women’s empowerment transcends the

division between the private and the public sphere as well as between different conceptions of peace.

Notwithstanding the diversity of roles that women play in conflicts,94 the symbiotic relationship

between women empowerment and their peace agency plays out in two major ways. Firstly, as in many

other conflict contexts95 women in Northeastern India have developed a whole array of strategies to

promote peace. In deeply patriarchal pockets of the country, such as Nagaland, women’s peace agency

had to be grounded in their traditional role in the family sphere in order to be socially acceptable. This

explains, why the Naga Mothers’ Association constitutes the most effective women’s rights organisation

in the region,96 using the position of motherhood for an expansion of women’s status in their families

and wider communities. Due to the success of women’s associations (e.g. the Naga Mothers’

Association, Tangkhul Shanao Long, Naga Women’s Union of Manipur) in mediating between the state

and insurgents and preventing bloodshed during sieges, state institutions in Northeast India have

entered strategic alliances with these organisations.97 More than a normative push towards

‘modernisation’, public investment in women’s socio-economic empowerment98 can thus be regarded

as a reward for women’s peace agency. In some parts of Nagaland, women’s political representation

was only enforced by state institutions two decades after the 73rd constitutional amendment - and its

backing by patriarchal village councils was sometimes only achieved after women had risked their lives

for their peace agency.99

16    

Secondly, this changing societal mindset regarding gender equality allows women to get involved in

governance bodies with a potentially significant impact on inner-community peace. Since the state-

versus-community conflict has largely been transformed into a conflict over governance and resource

distribution, previously hidden societal fissures are coming to the fore.100 The current conflict in

Nagaland is pitching settled segments of the population against migrants, and fosters contest between

ethnicities, generations and genders.101 Naga women’s traditional approach to initiate dialogue between

competing factions might serve conflict transformation in this new context, too. Furthermore,

scholarship suggests that women’s participation in running public affairs has increased the efficiency

and transparency of governance.102 Hence, Naga women’s growing freedom to break out of their

customary limitation to the family sphere, may help to mitigate governance-related conflicts over

resource distribution.

Political engagement may empower women in their families and communities, while it could also lead

to a backlash against them. In the Kashmir Valley, for instance, the joint attempt of Hindu, Muslim and

Sikh women to create safe spaces for reconciliation under the name of ‘Athwaas’ (handshake) did not

survive the pressure of local political dynamics. Due to a lack of political support, Athwaas’ loose

organisational structure crumbled during the ethnic tensions in 2008, eight years after its initiation.103

More research on the interaction between Indian peacebuilding and women’s peace agency is thus

necessary to establish its short- and long-term effects on gender relations and the family sphere.

Existing research indicates, however, that the inclusion of women in peacebuilding might be crucial to

mobilise communities towards ending violence against women and promoting their rights in the local

political, economic, social and family spheres.104

In sum, the Indian approach to peacebuilding deviates only in the economic sphere significantly from

the liberal approach:

[Table 1: here]  

Conclusions

In contrast to Western-centric scholarship, which argues that there is ‘no realistic or preferable

alternative to broadly liberal approaches’,105 a vanguard of critical peace and conflict scholars has started

to ‘look outside the mainstream of international political traditions, discourse, and operational

modalities’ for innovation.106 This paper has tried to consider, whether India’s internal peacebuilding

strategies could present such an alternative. However, despite a few hopeful developments, the authors

remain sceptical about both: the innovative content of the Indian approach in comparison with the

liberal peace, and the effectiveness of Indian peacebuilding in terms of sustainable conflict

17    

transformation. India’s peacebuilding approach does include redistributive policies and, in general, a

developmental strategy that tries to address local needs in contrast to the liberal approach. Nonetheless

Indian peacebuilding remains largely faithful to the central pillars of the liberal peace in several ways: its

security-heavy statebuilding strategy and its belief that local political participation under the provision

of political and certain moral rights is bound to provide the basis for sustainable local conflict

resolution.

Rather than constituting an alternative to the liberal peace, the Indian peacebuilding approach

crystallises the benefits as well as dangers of the liberal approach for the transformation of local conflict

spheres. India’s introduction of local mechanisms of participatory governance has proved an effective

tool only where input legitimacy (free and fair elections) has been matched with output legitimacy (real

transfer of power to the local level). In the fiercest and most persistent conflict contexts though, such

as Jammu and Kashmir output legitimacy remains lacking. As a consequence, new conflict dimensions

have been added to already existing ones. This illustrates that a pacification strategy, which prioritises

security over local rights and needs carries no potential for conflict transformation. Without society-

wide access to justice the pursuit of conflict transformation in Jammu and Kashmir through elections is

likely to have a limited effect: elections could facilitate some degree of socio-economic equality between

different societal groups, while state-society relations remain plagued by conflict.

As the cases of Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Northeast India illustrate, local self-determination can

facilitate as well as obstruct conflict transformation. The outcome depends largely on the sequencing

and management of the implementation process. The Indian process of decentralisation highlights the

complex interaction of rights and needs in peace processes. For all its advantages in terms of generating

local consensus on conflict resolution and transformation, decentralisation raises expectations which

may reignite old or fuel new tensions if frustrated. Hence, as soon as institutions of local participation

are established they need to be endowed with the political and economic resources to end

marginalisation and satisfy individual and community needs. By granting people political rights and

subsequently stalling the transfer of financial means and power required for needs satisfaction, people’s

perception of their own marginalisation might harden and thereby fuel rather than mitigate conflict

dynamics. Under such circumstances local elections could have the unintended side-effect of importing

conflicts into the family sphere. Furthermore, where local populations failed to be consulted in

decisions on development approaches, human rights (especially land and environmental rights) have

often been violated as a consequence. This has alienated local communities and ignited new conflicts

between them and the state across all three conflict cases. Women’s associations, by contrast, have been

crucial in transforming local conflict spheres in some cases. Hence, Indian state institutions’ strategic

18    

alliance with women’s associations constitutes one of the most promising elements of the current

Indian peacebuilding strategy. Here, the state succeeded in tying its own conflict transformation

strategy in with effective peace initiatives at the grassroots level, while also promoting gender equality as

an important component of socio-economic justice.

Thus, it is notable that the Indian peacebuilding strategy had similar impacts and suffered from similar

shortcomings across all three conflict cases, their differences notwithstanding. Indeed, many of the

problems identified in this article compare to issues raised in critical research on Western peacebuilding

approach in diverse conflict contexts, notably the problem of insensitivity towards local needs and

cultures.107 In India, the tide could be turning though. Notwithstanding the shortcomings elaborated

above, India’s peacebuilding approach has undergone several phases of strategy development and

experimentation:108 an early period of brutal modernization and oppression, which has caused new

state-society conflicts; a phase of trying to placate the demands of collective identities through ethno-

politics, which reinforced ethnic identities and thus inter-group tensions; the latest phase though seems

to be concerned with issues of wider equality, social justice and an attempt to reverse historical

processes of marginalisation as a strategy of conflict transformation. If the Indian state manages to

sideline the continuous elements of the previous two phases (and the elites which support them), its

peacebuilding approach might have the potential to promote an emancipatory peace in everyday life in

Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir as well as the Northeast.

 

   

19    

Table 1: Comparison between liberal and Indian Peacebuilding

Local conflict sphere

Liberal PB Indian PB Benefits of Indian PB

Dangers of Indian PB

Local societal sphere

Moral rights; minority rights;

Specific rights granted to collective identities to reverse marginalisation

Granting autonomy to dominant groups improves state/society relations

Oppression of minorities under new autonomy settings => new fault lines emerge in society

Local political sphere

Local elections Local self-determination through PRI / Autonomous Hills Councils

Potential to resolve conflicts between local elites and marginalised groups; increased transparency / accountability

Disappointed expectations could reignite local tensions if PRI are not sufficiently empowered

Local economic sphere

Market liberalisation; privatisation; ‘small state’ with limited redistributive capacity

1) large-scale modernization approach;

2) local consensus on redistribution through PRI;

3) national welfare schemes

2/3) conflict alleviation through decreasing inequality

1) new conflicts arise between affected groups and the state;

2) frustrated expectations create inter-group tensions if local redistribution mechanisms are ineffective

Gender relations Gender equality Women’s quota in PRI; strategic support for women’s rights groups

Increasing gender equality;

alleviation of governance-related conflicts

Conflicts may filter down to family level through local elections

 

 

 

                                                                                                                         1  The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement 266931. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted by our Indian partner institutions at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, Malaviya Centre for Peace Research at Benares Hindu University Society for Participatory Research in Asia and the University of Delhi.  Hence, we would like to thank our partners and our

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   sponsors, without whose input this paper could not have been written. Moreover, we would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. 2  Comparative studies on the causes of separatist conflict indicate that greed (i.e. the possibility to extract material benefits from conflict) may prolonge the duration of violent struggle but that greed in itself is unlikely to provoke separatist conflicts, 3 E.g. Oliver P. Richmond and Jason Franks, Liberal Peace Transitions: Between Statebuilding and Peacebuilding, Edinburgh University Press, 2009; Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Susanna Campbell, David Chandler, and Meera Sabaratnam, A Liberal Peace?: The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding, Zed Books, 2011; Tadjbakhsh, Shahrbanou (ed), Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives, Routledge, 2011. 4  Michael Pugh, ‘The Political Economy of Peacebuilding: A Critical Theory Perspective’, International Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 10, No.2, 2005, pp. 23 – 42.  5 John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997, p.20. 6 The ‘liberal peace’ thesis assumes that liberal countries will strive for international peace through the spread of liberal ideas and the international promotion of individual rights. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795, accessed at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm. 7  In the subsequent text the ‘liberal peace’ refers to the recent debate in Critical Peace and Conflict Studies, not to the earlier discourse in the US mainstream of International Relations. The latter was mainly concerned with the statistical significance of Michael Doyle’s thesis of an alleged peacefulness of democracies (see e.g. Michael Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review Vol. 80, No. 4, 1986, pp. 1151- 1169; Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace, Princeton University Press, 1993; David E. Spiro, ‘The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace’, International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1994, pp. 50 -86). By comparison, the liberal peace critique of the critical school of peace and conflict studies had a much broader research agenda: the political, social and economic consequences of the liberal peacebuilding agenda (see e.g. Vivienne Jabri, ‘War, Government, Politics: A Critical Response to the Hegemony of the Liberal Peace’, in: Oliver P. Richmond (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Peacebuilding: Critical Developments and Approaches. Palgrave, 2010, pp. 41 - 58; Roland Paris, ‘Critiques of Liberal Peace’, in: Campbell, Chandler, and Sabaratnam (eds.), A Liberal Peace?, 2011, pp. 31 – 54.    8 Oliver Richmond, UN Peace Operations and the Dilemmas of the Peacebuilding Consensus, International Peacekeeping, Vol.11, No.1, pp. 83-101. 9  Oliver P. Richmond, ‘A Post-Liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 35, 2009, pp. 557 – 580 [559 – 562].  10 Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, Cornell University Press, 2004. 11 Ian Gough, Economic Institutions and the Satisfaction of Human Needs. Journal of Economic Issues Vol 28, No.2, 1994, p.55. 12 For a useful summary of the links between needs-oriented welfare policies and social and political stability see Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, Routledge, 2011, pp. 31 – 40. 13  Volker Boege, Anne Brown, Kevin Clements and Anna Nolan, ‘On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States: State Formation in the Context of ‘Fragility’’. In Berghof Handbook Dialogue No. 8, 2008.  14 Ibid., , p.6. 15  The term ‘moral right’ carries the unfortunate assumption that its underlying morality is universally shared. Historically and philosophically, these rights reflect a Western concept of morality though (see Raimundo Panikkar, ‘Is the Notion of Human Rights a Western Concept?’, Diogenes Vol. 30, 1982, pp. 75 – 102.)  16 Jack Mahoney, The Challenge of Human Rights: Origin, Development, and Significance, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 72-73. 17 As Richmond notes endorsing private property through property rights, for instance, may clash with historical and customary notions of communality (Richmond forthcoming). 18  Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist Vol.104, No.3, 2002, pp. 783 – 790; Krista Hunt, ‘The Strategic Co-optation of Women’s Rights Discourse in the ‘War on Terrorism’, International Feminist Journal of Politics Vol.4, No.1, 2002, 116 – 121. 19  For a differentiated account of the complex dynamics between international human rights prosecution and conflict dynamics see Sarah Nouwen, Complementarity in the Line of Fire, Cambridge University Press, 2013.    20 Carolyn Heitmeyer, ‘There is Peace Here’: Managing communal Relations in a Town in Central Gujarat’, Journal of South Asian Development Vol.4, No.1, 2009, pp. 103-120. It should be noted, however, that such discourses reproduce distinctions, boundaries, and unequal practices of power in a society, see Philippa Williams, ‘Reproducing Everyday Peace in North India: Process, Politics, and Power’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol.103, No.1, 2013, pp. 230-250. 21 E.g. Mahoney (s. above); Upendra Baxi, Human Rights in a Posthuman World: Critical Essays, Oxford University Press, 2009; Charles R. Beitz and Robert E. Goodin (eds), Global Basic Rights, Oxford University Press, 2009; Eric Patterson, Ethics Beyond War's End, Georgetown University Press, 2012. 22  Oliver P. Richmond (s. above no.8), pp. 566 – 568.  23  Audra Mitchell, ‘Quality/Control: International Peace Interventions and ‘the Everyday’’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, 2011, pp. 1623 – 1645 [1624].  24 John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, Good Books, 2003.

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   25 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, 1999; Sen, Amartya. ‘Elements of a Theory of Human Rights’, Philosophy & Public Affairs Vol.32, No.4, 2004, pp.315 - 356. 26 Marshall had already identified several generations of citizenship rights, including social and welfare rights, in 1950 – albeit limited to the British context though (Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1950). 27 Jon Elster, ‘Majority Rule and Individual Rights’, In Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (eds.) On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, Basic Books, 1993, p. 181. 28 Len Doyal and Ian Gough, A Theory of Human Need, Macmillan, 1991. 29 Elster (s. above no.24), p. 181. 30 This definition is not derived from a revisionist normative agenda and does not intend to divorce rights from their economic dimension. Indeed by distinguishing between largely political rights and material needs, analysis of peacebuilding interventions can more clearly elaborate where the emphasis of Indian conflict transformation lies. Hence, this distinction is purely made for analytical reasons. 31 Sultan Barakat, ‘Post-war Reconstruction and Development: Coming of Age’, in Sultan Barakat (ed.) After the Conflict - Reconstruction and Development in the Aftermath of War, I.B. Tauris, 2010. 32 George J. Kunnath, ‘Becoming a Naxalite in Rural Bihar: Class Struggle and Its Contradictions’, Journal of Peasant Studies Vol.33, No.1, 2006, p 93. 33 Arvind N. Das, Agrarian Unrest and Socio-economic Change in Bihar, 1900-1980, Manohar, 1983. 34 Suruchi Thapar-Bjökert, ‘Caste, Gender and Armed Conflict in Rural Bihar’. NIASnytt Asia Insights, 2004. 35 Bela Bhatia, ‘The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar’, Economic and Political Weekly Vol.40, No.15, April 9, 2005, pp. 1542-1544. 36 Bhatia (s.above), p. 1536. 37 N.R. Mohanty, ‘Chronic Poverty and Social Conflict in Bihar’, CPRC-IIPA Working Paper, 2006, p. 1. 38  Human Rights Watch, ‘Between Two Sets of Guns. Attacks on Civil Society Activists in India’s Maoist Conflict,’ 2012, accessed at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/07/30/between-two-sets-guns-0.  39 Sumantra Bose, ‘Kashmir: Sources of Conflict, Dimensions of Peace’, Survival Vol.41, No.3, 1999, p. 153. 40 Maroof M. Raza, Low Intensity Conflicts: The New Dimension to India’s Military Commitments, Kartikeya Publications, 1995. 41 Shakti Bhatt, ‘State Terrorism Vs. Jihad in Kashmir’, Journal of Contemporary Asia Vol.33, No.2, 2003, pp. 219–220. 42 Ibid. 43 Sumona DasGupta, ‘Borderlands and Borderlines: Re-negotiating Boundaries in Jammu and Kashmir’, Journal of Borderlands Studies Vol. 27, No.1, 2012, p. 84. 44 U.A. Shimray, ‘Socio-Political Unrest in the Region Called North-East India’. Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 39. No. 42, 2004, p. 4637. 45 Rajesh Dev, ‘Human Rights, Relativism and Minorities in North-East India’, Economic and Political Weekly Vol.39, No.43, October 23, 2004, p. 4749. 46 Monica Banerjee, ‘Civil Society and Violence in India’s Northeast’, Journal of Civil Society Vol.5, No.2, 2009, p.157. 47 George T. Haokip, ‘On Ethnicity and Development Imperative: a Case Study of North-East India’, Asian Ethnicity Vol.13, No.3, 2012, p.222. 48 Haokip (s. above), p.222. 49 Banerjee (s. above no.44), p. 158. 50  Ujjiwal Kumar Singh, ‘The Silent Erosion: Anti Terror Laws and the Shifting Contours of Jurisprudence in India’, Diogenes Vol. 53, No. 4, 2006, pp. 116 – 133; Ashok Agarwal, ‘Paradigm of Impunity’, Economic and Political Weekly Vol.42, No.20, 2007, pp. 1814 – 1818; Human Rights Watch, “Getting Away With Murder: 50 Years of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act”, Human Rights Watch Report, August 2008, accessed at http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/2008/india0808/india0808web.pdf. 51  See e.g. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Terror, Law, and the Colonial State’, in: Ranabir Samaddar (ed.). The Materiality of Politics: Volume 1, Anthem Publishers, 2007, pp. 59- 106; Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Crimes, Passion, and Detachment – Colonial Foundations of Rule of Law’, in: Kalpana Kannabiran and Ranabir Singh (eds.). Challenging the Rule(s) of Law – Colonialism, Criminology and Human Rights in India. Sage Publications, 2008, pp. 355 – 382. 52 The concept of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) is based on a customary form of governance and was re-introduced in a remodeled form through the 73rd and 74th amendment of the Indian constitution in 1992. Beforehand, administrations below India’s 594 districts were not regarded as part of the federal state structure. The PRI system has two organizational branches: one for rural and one for urban areas. In rural areas, 600 district panchayats constitute the most centralised PRI level, followed by 6,000 block panchayats at the intermediate level and 250,000 gram panchayats at village level. Urban areas have their own panchayat strutures, which include 96 city corporations, 1,700 town municipalities and 1,900 nagar panchayats. George Mathew, ‘Panchayati Raj Intitutions and Human Rights in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.38, No.2, 2003, pp.155-156. 53 The autonomous councils are derived from a British colonial governance practice and have come to be used by the Indian state in the attempt to placate separatist movements in Darjeeling (West Bengal), Jharkhand, and for this study more relevant: Assam and Mizoram in Northeast as well as Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir. Martijn Van Beek, ‘Beyond Identity Fetishism: ‘Communal’ Conflict in Ladakh and the Limits of Autonomy’, Cultural Anthropology Vol.15, No. 4, 2001, p. 526.

22    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   54 DasGupta has pointed out, however, that the ‘national elite assumption that economic packages and job creation will be a panacea to protracted militarized conflicts also does not take into account that there are deep rooted political grievances that go beyond issues of employment’. Sumona DasGupta, ‘Pacification is not Peacebuilding: Why Special Economic Packages and Special Legislation Do Not Work, in Janel B. Galvanek, Hans-Joachim Giessmann and Mir Mubashir (eds.) Norms and Premises of Peace Governance: Socio-Cultural Commonalities and Differences in Europe and India, Berghof Occasional Papers No. 32, 2011, p. 20. 55 Marchetti and Tocci (s. above). 56 Sumona DasGupta, ‘Borderlands and Borderlines: Re-negotiating Boundaries in Jammu and Kashmir’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2012, p. 92. 57 Van Beek (s. above, n.49), p. 530. 58 Van Beek (s. above, n.49), pp. 530-531 59 DasGupta (s. above, n.41), p. 93. 60 DasGupta (s. above, n.41), pp. 93/94 61 Lederach (s. above, n.21). 62 Mohanty (s. above, n.34), p. 21. 63 Jawaharlal Nehru University 2012, ‘Preliminary Field Study of Bihar and Jharkhand’, p. 3. 64 Ibid., p. 5 65 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). 2012. ‘Field Visit to Leh’. 66 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). 2012. ‘Visit to Villages in Districts Jammu, Poonch, Rajouri, and Doda’. 67 Behera, Navnita Chadha. ‘Internal Conflicts and Governance: Understanding India's Practice,’ pp. 15 68 Ibid. 69 Benjamin Reilly, ‘Elections in Post-Conflict Scenarios: Constraints and Dangers’, International Peacekeeping Vol.9, No.2, 2002, pp.118–139; Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2004; Larry Diamond, ‘Promoting Democracy in Post-Conflict and Failed States. Lessons and Challenges’, Taiwan Journal of Democracy Vol.2, No.2, 2006, pp.93–116. 70 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). 2012. Prelimiary Observations on Local Self-Governance in Kashmir’. 71 Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Internal Conflicts and Governance: Understanding India's Practice,’ pp. 14. 72 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) (s. above, n.62). 73 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) (s. above, n.66). 74 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) (s. above, n.61). 75 Ibid. 76 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). (s. above, n.62). 77 Mathew, (s. above, n.36). 78 Ibid., p. 161. 79 Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Government of Peace’, Policies and Practices No. 53, Calcutta: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2012, pp. 14-15; Subir Bhaumik, Tripura: Ethnic Conflict, Militancy and Counterinsurgency, Policies and Practices No. 53, Calcutta: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2012, pp. 19-22. 80 Ibid., p. 19. 81 Samaddar (s. above, n.36), p. 15. 82  For an analysis of the central government’s changing approach in development policy, see Sandra Pogodda, Roger MacGinty and Oliver Richmond, ‘Intimate Yet Dysfunctional: The Relationship Between Governance and Conflict Resolution in India and the European Union’, Conflict Security and Development Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 33 - 59.      83 See Rekha Chowdhary, Panchayati Raj Institutions in J&K: Critical Analysis & Positive Suggestions, Kashmir Times, online at: http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=6400 84 DasGupta (s. above, n.38), p. 20. 85 Samir Kumar Das, ‘Peace by Governance or Governing Peace? A Case Study of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA)’, Policies and Practices No. 50, Calcutta: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, 2012, p. 13. 86 Mathew (s. above, n.48), p. 158. 87 Krishna Chaitanya, 1991. ‘Social Justice, Bihar Style’. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 46, 1991, p. 2612. 88 Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, ‘Land Reform, Poverty Reduction and Griwth: Evidence from India’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2000, pp. 389 – 430 [392]. 89 Patralekha Chatterjee, ‘Land Reform in India - Necessary but not Sufficient to Fight Poverty’, Development and Cooperation, Vol 43, No. 2 (March/April), 2002, pp.21 – 22. 90 Amit Prakash, Jharkhand: politics of development and identity. Orient Longman Limited, New Delhi, 2001. 91  Puja Dutta, Rinku Murgai, Martin Ravallion and Dominique P. Van de Walle, ‘Does India's Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment?’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6003, accessed at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2026807 92 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). (s. above, no.62). 93 Mathew (s. above, n.48), p. 159. 94 For a critique at the essentialised role of women in conflicts see Laura Sjoberg and Karen E. Gentry. Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics, Zed Books, 2007. Banerjee and Dey are providing an overview of war-promoting

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   roles performed by women in the Indian cultural context (Paula Banerjee and Ishita Dey, ‘Women, Conflict, and Governance in Nagaland?, Policies and Practices No. 51, Calcutta: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, pp. 1-2). 95 For an overview of women’s peace activism in different contexts, see Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Jonson Sirleaf, Women: War and Peace, The Independent Experts' Assessment of the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women's Role in Peacebuilding, United Nationas Development Fund for Women, 2002, accessed at http://147.96.1.15/info/ucmp/cont/descargas/documento7201.pdf. 96 See Banerjee and Dey (s. above, n.89), p. 14. 97 Ibid., pp. 13-17. 98 See ibid. for an overview of public institutions and policies for women empowerment in Northeast India. 99 Ibid., pp. 16-23. 100 Ibid., p. 18. 101 Ibid. 102 Matthew (s. above, n.48), p. 159. 103 For more information, see Sumona DasGupta, “Jammu and Kashmir”, CORE: Systematic Survey Report For Cases, 2013: p.23. 104 Zohra Moosa, Maryam Rahmani, and Lee Webster, “From the Private to the Public Sphere: New Research on Women’s Participation in Peace-Building,” Gender & Development 21, no. 3 (2013): 453–472. 105 Roland Paris,‘Saving Liberal Peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies Vol. 36, No.2, 2010, p. 362. 106 John Paul Lederach,Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, United States Institute of Peace, 1998, p. 27. 107 David Chandler. 2006. Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building. Pluto Press; Richmond, Oliver P. 2009. ‘A Post-liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday.’ Review of International Studies Vol.35, No. 3: 557–580; Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, ed. 2011. Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives. 1st ed. Routledge. 108  Since some elements of earlier phases have been lingering, this statement describes a trend rather than a succession of entirely distinct phases.