Book Project
Anchoring Rebellion: Ethnicity, Religion and Conflict Trajectory in South and Southeast Asia.
Ethnic groups are generally viewed by the scholarship on political violence as having a strong potential for political mobilization. Yet we observe a significant variation in the ability of the ethnic rebels to mobilize co-ethnics. What accounts for the variation in rebel mobilization across ethnic rebellions? In this book, I offer a socio-structural theory of rebellion that not only accounts for the variation in insurgent mobilization across ethnic rebellions but also outcomes of such conflicts by tracing the roots of conflict outcomes in insurgent mobilization. While the existing literature on ethnic mobilization remains focused on factors external to an ethnic group, such as repression, opportunity and institutions, my research brings attention to a factor internal to ethnic groups – structural connectivity of its population. Structural connectivity captures the relational aspect of ethnicity and encapsulates the extent to which individuals and sub-ethnic entities (families, neighborhood, clans, and tribes) are connected to each other and to the outside world. I developed a typology of ethnic groups based on their structural connectivity to account for variation in insurgent mobilization. In agrarian societies religion and ethnicity are enmeshed and that religion – through practices, institutions, and organizations – determines the structural connectivity of an ethnic group.
I also show how structural connectivity, through its effects on insurgent mobilization, determines conflict outcome around the world. The social network of an insurgent group affects conflict outcome by determining the sets of resources and constraints available to them. This project brings attention to the role of the population in shaping conflict outcome and is among the first to conduct a systematic, global test of this role using one-of-a-kind data on 166 ethnic insurgent groups across the world measuring the extent of their embeddedness in the population. It also offers a nuanced look at conflict outcomes by offering additional outcomes than traditionally studied in the literature.
This project draws upon intensive multiyear fieldwork in Northeast India focused on the Meitei, Mizo, and Naga rebellions. It employs archival records, ethnographic observations, interviews, thematic maps, and government and insurgent documents, including recruitment records. I supplement my ethnographic and archival work with a survey of over 2,268 ex-insurgents and civilians in Mizoram, a survey experiment involving over 1,143 Meitei civilians in Manipur, in-depth, structured interviews of 107 tribal elders from across nine sub-ethnic groups in Nagaland and a global dataset on social structures of ethnic groups.
Other Projects
“Environmental Stress, Political Institutions & Social Conflict: Evidence from South Asia.”
This project, funded by a multi-year grant from the US National Science Foundation, investigates how water access and local political institutions interact to shape social conflict in India and Pakistan. The investigators leverage discontinuities in historical and contemporary political institutions across carefully-selected subnational – district and subdistrict – and national boundaries and a range of methodological tools including ethnographic work and a survey experiment to facilitate a strong causal inference. They develop a theoretical framework that builds on the existing literature and their recent work to offer a nuanced understanding of the role of historical and contemporary political institutions in moderating the effects of environmental stress on social conflict. In theorizing about this relationship, the principal investigators challenge the dominant perspective on the role of colonial institutions and highlight the importance of distinguishing between inter- and intra-ethnic divisions. They offer a rigorous empirical framework that analyzes data at three different levels – district, subdistrict and individual – within carefully controlled geographical settings to give us greater confidence in the findings. While the district level analysis covers all districts of India and Pakistan, the sub-district level analysis of areas involves select clusters of geographically contiguous provinces in these countries including subdistricts formerly included in the British India province of the Punjab, which was divided between them in 1947. For district and subdistrict analysis, the project will generate: a) large-scale, high-resolution data on the entire, accentuated-attenuated, social conflict spectrum in South Asia by gathering data on a variety of attenuated manifestations of violence organized around religion- and lineage-based identities; and, b) highly-localized data on water security and political institutions across the two countries. To further validate their findings and clearly identify causal mechanisms, the investigators will benchmark the results of district and subdistrict analysis against the information obtained from a forced-choice conjoint experiment deployed in 240 carefully selected primary census units in India and ethnographic work conducted in a sub-set of these communities.
“Colonization, Religion and Ethnicity: How Colonial-era Religious Changes Shaped Ethnic Politics in Post-colonial India.”
This project builds upon the argument advanced in my book project and the literature on social capital to argue that the characteristics of the network of social relations of an ethnic group can help explain the distribution of inter- and intra-ethnic trust across its population. I argue that the network of social relations constituting an ethnic group has strong imprints on the practices, organizations and institutions associated with the particular religious sect or mission it experienced over the course of last millennium. An individual’s or community’s location in this network could shape their attitude and behavior towards both co-ethnics and outsiders. The approach is to identify breaks in the network of social relations of an ethnic group to identify ‘boundaries of trust’ in the network, which may or may not be coterminous with ethnic or religious boundaries. This project is supported by a grant from the Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) at the University of Notre Dame. I have designed and administered a large survey experiment involving over 3,360 participants, conducted in eight different languages across 250 village communities, covering some of the most inhospitable and insurgency-affected areas, in the Indian state of Manipur.