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 life” (p. 6). In doing so Baruah avoids “well-known security and counter-insurgency experts” in order to maintain a “critical distance from conventional wisdom” (p. 6). The book will likely find two main audiences: 1) those with an interest in borderlands and ethnic minorities in India and in Asia and 2) those with a specific interest in the Northeast. The diversity of the volume ensures that it will speak to both audiences though among the 15 chapters those that engage one audience will vary from those that engage the other.

For the first audience the chapters that situate the Northeast within the Indian state and critically analyse the relationships between the two provide a good entry point to the region. Samir Kumar Das's chapter deconstructs peace agreements between different Indian governments and insurgent groups discouraging easy correlations between these agreements and the strength of Indian democracy. Three chapters deal specifically with the ways development has been conceived and carried out. Subir Bhaumik's chapter on Tripura makes links between land, development, migration and ethnic conflict. Pradip Pharjoubam finds fault with the overly deterministic state-led development paradigm that has overshadowed the prospects for human development while Betsy Taylor identifies ways changes in thinking about identity, gender, and environment in Arunachal Pradesh may make human development approaches possible. The spectre of ethnic categorisations are discussed by H. Kham Khan Suan, who complicates the hills/plains divide in Manipur, while Bhagat Oinam criticises the creation of the category “Northeast,” instead focusing on the intra-regional dimensions of identity. Ananya Vajpeyi and Makiko Kimura bring new insights to two well-known episodes of contestation by discussing the naked protests of women in Manipur against the armed forces and the extreme violence against Bengalis in the village of Nellie in Assam in 1983, respectively. In the final chapter, Bethany Lacina argues that the two most commonly touted “solutions” to the problems of the Northeast, counterinsurgency and “soft power,” fail to take into account the role of elites in the relationships between social grievance and violence (p. 330).

For the second audience the chapters that most successfully force a “rethinking” are those by authors for whom counterinsurgency is a peripheral concern and is re-situated in complex fabrics of experience in and of the region. Dolly Kikon reverses the “India in the Northeast” scenario by describing the ways the Northeast is constructed in the rest of India. She details the ways this structures the everyday experiences of people from the Northeast in other parts of India and the manifestations of these relationships when refracted back into the region. Using examples from Nagaland, Kikon demonstrates the ways stereotyping attributes differentiated identities, representations, and collective memories that foster particular courses of political action. Rakhee Kalita's chapter situates the Assamese “terrorist” in contemporary Assamese literature, unpacking the complex and contradictory place of insurgents among the peoples they claim to represent. Bodhisattva Kar takes the inner-line imposed by the British between the plains and the hills and discusses the function of the line in framing the spaces eligible for capital and later for democratic citizenship, marking the continuity between colonial and postcolonial conceptions of marginality. Nandana Dutta's masterful deconstruction of the “narrative of neglect” (p. 127) in the Northeast demonstrates the difficulties in shaping counter-narratives that discard dominant perceptions of center-Northeast relationships. Yet such shifts occur frequently when we decide to look, as evident in the example of narrative shifts transcending rigid identities in Assam. Rather than offering new insights into old issues this latter group of chapters alter the grounds upon which we look at the region and in doing so they take up the task of continually reshaping the landscape of scholarship on the Northeast begun by the book's editor.