Security and Development in India's Northeast

Description

This book is an insightful account of the security and development paradox in India’s Northeastern Region (NER). It examines the social dynamics of proliferation of ethnic militancy and civil war in the region during the 1980s. The volume explores the strong interlinkages among external security threats, economic underdevelopment, and the consequent deterioration of internal insecurity in the region. These, it establishes, have led the NER into a ‘conflict trap’. Gurudas Das argues in favour of cross-border cooperation as a way out of grievance-based ethnic militancy arising out of peripheral underdevelopment. He suggests a three-pronged approach for breaking the conflict trap: integrating the NER economy with that of South and Southeast Asia through active economic diplomacy; adopting a community-based organization led development model for conflict zones; and improving governance through the practice of politics of accommodation as opposed to politics of identity.