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Until 15 years ago scholars of Northeast India have traversed a sparse landscape populated by two main literatures. The first uses anthropology to catalogue the lifestyles of different ethnic communities. The second locates the Northeast within the rubric of national security presenting a turbulent and violent region. These literatures are linked: ethnic difference is used to explain the incapacity of communities to live peacefully within India, while the failures of the state to integrate difference are used to explain insurgency. Sanjib Baruah has almost single-handedly altered this landscape. His pioneering work broke with these dominant literatures by focusing on the dynamics of identity production and reproduction within the region as well as between the region and the rest of India, by centring the continuities between colonial and post-colonial state-building, and by linking these to the political economy of the region. Baruah has created the conceptual vocabulary that virtually all scholars of the Northeast deploy.
In Beyond Counterinsurgency Baruah brings together authors from the region itself, particularly younger scholars and prolific local authors with the aim of embodying the critically rethinking "going on in the region's rich public intellectual lifeâ[euro] (p. 6). In doing so Baruah avoids...