Search

What are the reasons for the participation of indigenous groups in the class based Maoist insurgencies? What are its consequences? Have ethnic participation fuelled the growth of the communist insurgencies after the end of Cold War? This paper explores the questions by looking at three well known Maoist insurgencies in Nepal, Peru, and India that began during democracies with significant participation of the indigenous groups. Peru's insurgency terminated despite reaching a significant height, the Nepali insurgents joined the government, and India's insurgency did not grow as much as in Peru and India but has persisted since the 1960s. The paper analyzes the attitudes and policies of the state and insurgents toward the indigenous groups and the affect of indigenous participation, or the lack of it, on the varied trajectories of the insurgencies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do patterns of political leadership affect the trajectories of ethnic separatist movements? The main bodies of theoretical literature (primordialism, instrumentalism, socio-psychological approaches, rational-choice theory, and "social movement" theory) all demonstrate remarkable uniformity in how they analyze the effects of political leadership on the course of ethnic movements. These theoretical approaches focus almost exclusively on the emotional or material relationship between leaders and their ethnic followers. They fail to give sufficient attention to the effects of "patterns of political leadership" (defined as the political inter-relationships between state and ethnic elites, between ethnic elites, and between state elites) on the evolution of ethnic movements. This paper takes an incipient step to fill this void. I use the macrohistorical approach and a "most-similar-systems" research design to compare and contrast the effects of "patterns of political leadership" on the trajectories of several ethnic movements in India. This includes the ethnic insurgencies in Punjab, Kashmir, and Assam in the Northeast. The larger goal of this paper is to formulate the basis for an incipient theory or model of how "patterns of political leadership" affect the trajectory of separatist insurgencies in general. Thus, this paper has both substantive and theoretical implications. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]