'The Maoist Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in India'

Development Research Seminar by doctor George Kunnath, Researcher at Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Background

In this seminar George Kunnath engage with the concept of violence in the context of the ongoing Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency in India.

He will focus on two fundamental questions:

How do we conceptualise violence? How do we position ourselves in relation to the violence we study?

Applying the framework of ‘the Spiral of Violence’ developed by the Brazilian liberation theologian Helder Da Camara, he will explore the role of structural injustice, resistance and repression in the conceptualisation of violence. Further, He will reflect on the positionality of the researcher in violent contexts - the ethics of taking sides or being neutral, drawing on twenty years of my ethnographic research and development work among Dalits, Adivasis and the Maoist guerrillas in the eastern Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand.
While emphasising the significance of undertaking a morally and politically engaged research among vulnerable communities, he will discuss the dilemmas of identifying with and writing from the vantage point of a particular community and political practice.

About the speaker

Dr George Kunnath is Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. An anthropologist by training, his work focuses on the everyday world of Dalit and Adivasi communities in the context of the expansion of the Maoist revolution and the state in rural and forested areas of Eastern and Central India.
He has published in Current Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Dialectical Anthropology, among others.
His book Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the Maoist Revolution in Bihar (2012) discusses Dalit resistance, caste and class relations, and agrarian violence. Currently, he is working on a monograph on Maoists, Adivasis, and development in India.