The study of conflict in South Asia has been traditionally partitioned between insurgencies and ethnic riots. In this seminar, Adnan constructs a conceptual framework that integrates the two into a single geography of conflict and explains the distribution of these two forms of conflict through analysing variations in state capacity and state-society relations across India’s national geography.
Briefly, he argues that in regions where the state and society interpenetrate, we see sovereignty-neutral violence as groups contend with one another over control of state apparatus. Where state and society maintains significant distance from one another, we see sovereignty-challenging violence as groups seek to supplant the state as the final arbiter of distribution and coercion.
About the Speaker
Adnan Naseemullah is a Lecturer in International Relations and South Asia at King’s College London. He received his PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are economic development, state capacity and political order, in relation to the Indian subcontinent. He is the author of Development after Statism (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and his work has appeared in Studies in Comparative International Development and Governance.
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