Counterinsurgents’ use of force and “armed orders” in Naga Northeast India

Recent works have highlighted deeply political variations in Indian counterinsurgency across space and time, leading to the emergence of a diversity of “armed orders” ranging from outright clashes to openly cooperative state-insurgent relationships. However, we know little about how variations in counterinsurgency strategy, particularly in the levels of force employed, shape the functioning of these armed orders. Drawing on original case study evidence from the Naga insurgency, this article builds on existing works on state-insurgent orders by developing a typology of variations in the use of force, accounting for counterinsurgents’ use of force to undermine, modify and uphold a patchwork of complex and fragile state-insurgent orders across space and time in India’s Naga conflict. In doing so, it contributes to debates on the use of force in counterinsurgency and the study of order in conflict in India’s Northeast.