Full Description
This volume explores new perspectives on contemporary forms of violence in South Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and case studies, it examines the infiltration of violence at the societal level and affords a comparative regional analysis of its historical, cultural and geopolitical origins in South Asia. Featuring essays from Sri Lanka to Nepal, and from Afghanistan to Burma, it sheds light on issues as wide-ranging as lynching and mob justice, hate speech, caste violence, gender-based violence and the plight of the Rohingyas, among others.
Lucid and engaging, this book will be an invaluable source of reference as well as scholarship to students and researchers of postcolonial studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural geography, minority studies, politics and gender studies.
Contents
List of contributors. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction: genealogies of violence in South Asia. Part I: Structural violence: ideologies, hierarchies and symbolic acts 2. Neither war nor peace: political order and post-conflict violence in Nepal. 3. Caste violence: free speech or atrocity? 4. The representational burden of ethno-nationalist violence in Sri Lanka. 5. Mapping extraordinary measures: militarisation and political resistance in Kashmir. Part II: Gendered violence: rape, misogyny and feminist discourse 6. Sex, rape, representation: cultures of sexual violence in contemporary India. 7. Biographies of violence and the violence of biographies: writing about rape in Pakistan. 8. Violence in public spaces: security and agency of women in West Bengal. Part III: Outsourced violence: mobs, insurgents and private armies 9. Violence and perilous trans-borderal journeys: the Rohingyas as the nowhere-nation precariat. 10. India's lynchings: ordinary crimes, rough justice or command hate crimes? 11. Violence, neoliberal state and the dispossession of adivasis in Central India. Part IV: Cultures of violence: fractured histories, fissured communities 12. Afghanistan: military occupation, violence and ethnocracy. 13. Social roots of insurgency in Kashmir. 14. Islamist attacks against secular bloggers in Bangladesh. 15. Democratic voice and the paradox of Nepal bandhas. Index.
