Ending India's Naga Conflict

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 434-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjib Baruah

Abstract For quite some time now, there has been an effort to settle India's Naga conflict. Instead of ordering the developments in the conventional teleological narrative of a peace process, this article looks at certain facts on the ground created by the two-decades-old cease-fire and the negotiations that have gone on for almost as long. Dismantling these transitional structures will not be easy. This existing regime of “shared sovereignty”—to use a key phrase from the negotiations as a category of practice—is based on a form of informal partnership between state and nonstate armed entities. It serves to provide the kind of protection ideally suited for economic transactions associated with the so-called informal sector economy in the region. There are affinities between this emergent order and the indirect rule regime of the British colonial era.

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Caitlyn Bolton

European colonialism and missionization in Africa initiated a massive orthographic shift across the continent, as local languages that had been written for centuries in Arabic letters were forcibly re-written in Roman orthography through language standardization reforms and the introduction of colonial public schools. Using early missionary grammars promoting the “conversion of Africa from the East,” British colonial standardization policies and educational reforms, as well as petitions and newspaper editorials by the local Swahilispeaking community, I trace the story of the Romanization of Swahili in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili dialect. While the Romanization of African languages such as Swahili was part of a project of making Africa legible to Europeans during the colonial era, the resulting generation gap as children and parents read different letters made Africa more illegible to Africans themselves.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (15) ◽  
Author(s):  
Uqbah Iqbal ◽  
Nordin Hussin ◽  
Ahmad Ali Seman

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-476
Author(s):  
Sarah Kunkel

AbstractThis article analyses the implications of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 on colonial labour policies for road labour carried out under chiefs in the Gold Coast. The British colonial administration implemented a legal application of the convention that allowed the continuation of the existing system of public works. In the Gold Coast, the issue of road labour was most prominent in the North, where chiefs maintained the majority of roads. Indirect rule became crucial in retaining forced labour in compliance with the convention. This article focuses on “hidden strategies” of British colonialism after 1930, contrasting studies of blatant cases of forced labour. The analysis is based on a close scrutiny of the internal discourse among colonial officials on the question of road labour and the Forced Labour Convention.


2019 ◽  
pp. 12-25
Author(s):  
Katherine Isobel Baxter

Chapter One provides an account of the history of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria, focusing particularly on politics and law. The chapter recounts the long history of British colonial presence in West Africa and explains the introduction of indirect rule as a system of colonial government from the turn of the century. Some of the impacts of indirect rule are considered through reference to Obafemi Awolowo’s memoir, Awo, and Chinua Achebe’s novel, Arrow of God. The chapter also sketches out the divisions that indirect rule fomented and the resistance to which it gave rise. Finally, the chapter explains the implications of indirect rule for the implementation of law in Nigeria both during colonial rule and following independence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 90 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Ellis

Hong Kong is adrift between its British colonial past and its upcoming political reunification with the ancestral Chinese motherland. Hong Kong has endured a prolonged identity crisis in recent years, as it struggles to reconcile conflicts between its transnational worldview and the cultural identity, or Chineseness, of its majority population. A growing wave of nostalgia for the colonial era has frustrated Beijing’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of Hongkongers. This essay analyzes how Hong Kong’s distinctive local character is reflected in several socio-cultural arenas: the heritage industry, filmmaking, efforts to preserve historic structures and intangible heritage, public education, and tourism. With reunification on the horizon, Hongkongers want to assert an independent cultural identity but still seem to exist at the “intersection of different spaces”.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165
Author(s):  
Carol V. Mckinney

Within a 55-year period, most Bajju (Kaje) of southern Kaduna State in northern Nigeria converted to Christianity. This research identifies factors that contributed to this widespread adoption of Christianity, including political, religious, sociological, and personal factors. Lack of political representation throughout the British colonial era and the imposition of Native Authority administration formed the context within which conversion occurred. While this structure of the administrative context tended to be oppressive to the non-Muslim ethnic groups, including the Bajju, from a Bajju perspective their widespread conversion to Christianity was a profoundly religious movement.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.


Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 426-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIORA BIGON

ABSTRACT:The published literature that has thoroughly treated the history of European planning in sub-Saharan Africa is still rather scanty. This article examines French and British colonial policies for town planning and street naming in Dakar and Lagos, their chief lieux de colonisation in West Africa. It will trace the relationships between the physical and conceptual aspects of town planning and the colonial doctrines that produced these plans from the official establishment of these cities as colonial capitals in the mid-nineteenth century and up to the inter-war period. Whereas in Dakar these aspects reflected a Eurocentric meta-narrative that excluded African histories and identities, a glimpse at contemporary Lagos shows the opposite. This study is one of few that compares colonial doctrines of assimilation to doctrines of indirect rule as each affects urban planning.


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