Managing Insurgency: Counterinsurgency and Order Negotiation in Northeast India
Publication Date
2026-12
End of Embargo
Supervisor
Rights
Peer-Reviewed
Not Applicable
Open Access status
closedAccess
Accepted for publication
Institution
Department
Awarded
Embargo end date
Collections
Additional title
Abstract
Drawing on award-winning research, Managing Insurgency argues that counterinsurgency campaigns do not simply restore or impose order, but set in motion multi-layered processes of order negotiation which preserve, modify or destabilise the formal and informal rules governing social and political relationships within armed conflict. It breaks new ground in the recent ‘order turn’ in the study of civil wars by developing an original typology of ‘order negotiation’ processes in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, reintroducing the somewhat neglected role of the state in this emerging field. Showing how counterinsurgents engage in multi-layered processes of Order Preservation, Order Modification and Order Destabilisation along three axes of Internal State, State-Insurgent and State-Societal ordering, the typology opens up the black box of state COIN strategy while generating a novel framework for mapping ordering processes in intra-state conflict. It illustrates these processes by drawing on original fieldwork from the Assam and Naga insurgencies - two understudied conflicts from Northeast India - generating distinctive insights into the workings of counterinsurgency command structures, the careful management and probing of the ‘rules’ of local order and the exploitation of intra-rebel cleavages. These myriad, criss-crossing processes of negotiation have – not necessarily by strategic design – managed the insurgencies into decades of long-term, but imperfect, uneven and uncertain – forms of decline. The deeply complex and political picture of counterinsurgency that the book presents forces a rethinking of conventional assumptions across the Indian and wider COIN literatures. Its conceptual reimagining of civil war processes offers a new lens to map the array of actors that can shape order in conflict settings and locate the state’s interactions within them.
Version
No full-text in the repository
Citation
Waterman A (2026) Managing Insurgency: Counterinsurgency and Order Negotiation in Northeast India. New York: Oxford University Press.
Link to publisher’s version
Link to published version
Link to Version of Record
Type
Book