Violence and Good Governance Working Group

Session Submission Type: Business Meeting

Session Description

In India in recent times, ascendant nationalism has accompanied assertions of good governance. This working group studies different types of violence and its consequences for democracy with an empirical focus on India, the world’s most populous and functional democracy. We focus on the mechanisms and consequences of qualitatively different forms of collective violence, namely communal (or ethnic) riots, political violence, lynching, and vigilantism, on targeted minorities such as Sikhs in Kashmir, Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi, Muslims in Gujarat, and Buddhist Tibetan refugees. Our purpose, therefore, is to facilitate comparative analyses. We use diverse methodologies such as ethnography, digital ethnography, statistical analysis, spatial analysis, archival research, and policy analysis and use displacement as a lens in that we avoid hierarchies or genealogies.
This group has met before to discuss the theoretical and methodological framework of collective violence—the mechanisms, producers, and consequences—at conferences in Paris and New Delhi. The goal this time is to investigate the long-term implications of violence on institutions, spaces, in forging common will and as a political strategy to obtain power.
At APSA in 2019, we plan to attend many panels to consider the processes and effect of violence on identity, governance and the larger polity such as institutions and the state. The group would like to draw scholars from other countries in South Asia and beyond to add to the comparative dimension of our work.

Sub Unit

• APSA Panels and All Meetings and Receptions

Chair

• Sanjeevini Badigar Lokhande Temple University