Duncan McDuie-Ra

The Northeast border region of India is a crossroads of Southeast Asia, where India meets China and the Himalayas, and home to many ethnic minorities from across the continent. The area is also the birthplace of a number of secessionist and insurgent movements and a hotbed of political fervor and violent instability. In this trailblazing new study, Duncan McDuie-Ra observes the everyday lives of the thousands of men and women who leave the region every year to work, study, and find refuge in Delhi. He examines how new migrants navigate the rampant racism, harassment, and even violence they face upon their arrival in Delhi. But McDuie-Ra does not paint them simply as victims of the city, but also as contributors to Delhi's vibrant community and increasing cosmopolitanism. India's embrace of globalization has created employment opportunities for Northeast migrants in many capitalistic enterprises: shopping malls, restaurants, and call centers. They have been able to create their own “map” of Delhi and their own communities within the larger and often unfriendly one of the metropolis.

Race, Refuge and Retail

Northeast Migrants in Delhi

Dolly Kikon

For a city in India's northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia's longest-running separatist conflict, Dimapur remains 'off the map'. With no 'glorious' past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur's essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of the everyday life, lived reality of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space. Ceasefire City aims to capture the dynamics of Dimapur by bringing together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces in the city and the embodied experiences of the city by its residents. The first part of the book talks about military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur through an analysis of its spatial politics, and the second part, through collaborative ethnographic exercises, focuses on the relationship between the lived realities and the meanings that are forged around the city.

Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur

Ceasefire City

While India has been a popular subject of scholarly analysis in the past decade, the majority of that attention has been focused on its major cities. This volume instead explores contemporary urban life in a smaller city located in India's Northeast borderland at a time of dramatic change, showing how this city has been profoundly affected by armed conflict, militarism, displacement, interethnic tensions, and the expansion of neoliberal capitalism.

frontier to Gateway

Borderland City in New India

This book examines the relationship between civil society and human security in the Indian state of Meghalaya, part of the region known as Northeast India. Civil society has been revived over the last two decades and is now one of the key concepts in development, politics, and international aid. The concept has gained particular significance as part of attempts to analyse and instigate grassroots democratisation through widespread political participation. This is seen as enabling a broader range of issues to be politicised and made a part of political agendas at the local, national, and global levels. However there are few studies that examine the constraints on civil society at the local level, even in contexts where civil society may appear to be active and vibrant. Those studies that do exist tend to focus on the constraints coming from the state, overlooking the constraints that come from within civil society itself. During the same period human security has gained prominence as a challenge to state-centric conceptions of security and as an alternative approach to development by focusing on the security and insecurity of groups and individuals. The concept has been taken up by international organisations, development agencies, and bilateral donors as a more effective way to understand the difficulties people face in their everyday lives that go beyond conventional categories and indicators. In order for those experiencing insecurity to identify and contest the causes of insecurity, participation in civil society is necessary.

Duncan McDuie-Ra

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