On ethnicity and development imperative: a case study of North-East India

‘North East India’ composed of different ethnicity is plagued with ethnic assertions and regionalism with that of centuries of alienation. Development is one big issue that need to be address in the region. The North East India after decades of independence is still lagging behind in term of socio, economic, education, political, cultural and social development. A deeper study reveals that movement for separate homeland, regionalism, tribalism, ethnic clash, crime, mass poverty, etc in the region are caused by backwardness of the region. The distinct geo-ethnic and socio-historical characters of North-East India constitute the hotbed of ethnic strife and extreme radicalism. The solution lies partly in resolving the conflict between primordial ethnic loyalties or ‘ethno-nationalism’ and the ‘nationalism of the nation state’, and partly a conscious and voluntary effort to resist corruption and unholy alliance between the militants and the politicians in the region. In any case, ethnic reconciliation would result in the reduction of ethnic violence of all kinds and would eventually restore law and order in the region. When the civil governance in the region will be spared from combating militancy or appeasing the militants, the whole energy of the government would be for strengthening the institutions of local self-government, which act as potential agents of development in the conflict-ridden states of the North-East India.     

Understanding the Sustainability of Insurgency Conflict in Thailand

Abstract

This article seeks to model the insurgency conflict in the three southern border provinces of the Kingdom of Thailand: Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. In so doing, it will explore the sustainability of the conflict by representing it in terms of a conflict life cycle that is responsive to complexity and change. The cycle arises from the cybernetic viable systems theory of ‘living systems’, and is able to foster a better understanding of what is happening empirically on the social level in these provinces, in respect to a situation characterized as one of incessant conflicts. This conflict model that arises suggests that there is an interconnection between the agents involved, and their individual and interactive dynamics. The conflict involves five types of politically related behaviours that occur between two interactive agents: the state (engaged in searching for and making arrests of insurgents) and the insurgents (engaged in violent acts of shooting, bombing, and arson). These agents are studied to the end of being able to determine the precise interactive nature of the political conflict in which they are engaged. In carrying out this investigation both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used. The research was carried out in three stages. In the first stage, time series techniques were used to determine inferentially whether the conflict is both rational and involves interactive behaviours. Stage two adopts the Weibull distribution technique to assess the political conflict. In the third stage, a statistical analysis is conducted of the conflict situation in political terms. Finally, it is explained how the model and the methods used in this article may be used to deal with intractable conflict in other social environments, incidentally tracking the likelihood of conflicts being sustainable. Other agencies could utilize this approach in examining other political conflicts so as to be better able to prepare suitable approaches for coping with intractable conflicts to the end of fostering sustainable peace processes.     

Insurgency as complex network: Image co-appearance and hierarchy in the PKK

Despite a growing recognition of the importance of insurgent group structure on conflict outcomes, there is very little empirical research thereon. Though this problem is rooted in the inaccessibility of data on militant group structure, insurgents frequently publish large volumes of image data on the internet. In this paper, I develop a new methodology that leverages this abundant but underutilized source of data by automating the creation of a social network graph based on co-appearance in photographs using deep learning. Using a trove of 20,645 obituary images published online by the PKK, a Kurdish militant group in Turkey, I demonstrate that an individual’s centrality in the resulting co-appearance network is closely correlated with their rank in the insurgent group.     

Political Violence and Legitimation: The Episode of Colonial Cyprus

Guerrilla warfare often becomes popular despite the fact that many aspects of it are morally objectionable. Guerrilla groups too, instead of being considered terrorists, often become legitimate political actors. How does this happen? How does the process of legitimation of political violence work? I argue that this process is social and cognitive at the same time, and that a framework for its explanation must be able to account for this dualism. I build such an analytical framework on McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly’s approach to social movement studies and on the general sociology of Pierre Boudieu. I use it to analyze the legitimation process of the guerilla anti-colonial campaign in Cyprus. In the legitimation process of Cyprus, two social mechanisms proposed by McAdam et al. played a critical role at an early stage—the mechanisms of certification and of boundary-drawing. Later, a social mechanism that I term “valorization” was central as well. To appreciate the effectiveness of these mechanisms, however, I argue that the dispositional facet of the legitimation process must be accounted for as well. I do this through field analysis, focusing in particular on positions of social and symbolic power. The analysis of the legitimation process in Cyprus offers lessons for the study of other similar processes. By showing how the three mechanisms worked effectively, and also showing the limits of their effectiveness, this analysis offers readily comparable causal analogies