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Purpose – Rural–urban divides characterize many violent internecine conflicts. The lack of rural development is often cited as an underlying structural cause of this phenomenon, and thus strengthening rural–urban linkages is often touted as a way of dismantling the structural conditions for internecine violence. This chapter attempts to identify how both the strength and the form of rural–urban linkages influence the intensity of insurgent violence.

Methodology – Using geographic information systems, this chapter analyzes the intensity of specific violent attacks by rural insurgent groups in Maoist India as a function of rural–urban linkages and transportation network redundancy.

Findings – It finds that the degree of interconnectivity in transportation networks is a more robust determinant of restraint among violent actors than the sheer strength of rural–urban linkages. Production networks characterized by highly networked road systems are more likely to incent restrained behavior among rebel groups, which may be dependent on taxation or extortion through obstruction.

Limitations/implications – The chapter quantitatively analyzes a phenomenon, but does not identify causal mechanisms driving it. The policy implication is that providing transportation infrastructure within rural areas may be a more effective guard against insurgent violence than connecting urban and rural areas.

Originality – The chapter makes a methodologically unique link between the large existing literature on rural–urban linkages, and the growing literature on trade networks in violent conflict.

This chapter focuses on the Maoist insurgency in the 75 districts of Nepal and tries to analyze the insurgency in a comparative perspective. We compare the 75 districts with the aim to address the following questions: Why does an insurgency emerge in certain areas? How is it linked to economic, social, or political factors? Why does an insurgency show a robust presence in some districts but fail to do likewise in others? We attempt to answer these questions by conducting multivariate regressions using longitudinal data to test our primary hypothesis that the onset of an insurgency and the continuation are functions of the same factors. We examine insurgency within one country, Nepal, and test our model in Nepal's 75 districts, in a single country context, using available data on the 10-year-long insurgency. We break down the Nepalese insurgency into two parts: the onset and the continuation. Our findings indicate that regions predominantly polarized by caste are more prone to the onset of insurgency than any other factor. Higher literacy rate, a proxy for government efficacy, renders insurgency less feasible, and difficult terrain has no impact whatsoever. However, after the onset, many of the explanatory variables are no longer significant for the continuation of the insurgency and grievances alone tend to be meaningless.

Conflict resolution and peace building has acquired much significance in the last few years (Siddiqi, 2003).

Drawing on recent, successful experience in Nepal, this paper traces the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in designing roles, structures, and processes to support the engagement of private-sector businesses and non-profit civic organizations in a peace-building response to the collapse of governance and the Maoist insurgency. Specific case illustrations are offered including: the design of grassroots peace building and development organizations; the need for continual redesign; the power of populist design; the positive design lens for micro-business and post-conflict development in Africa; and the positive design lens in global business. The paper concludes by asking what might be learned from this experience that might bring new hope to Africa, the Middle East, and other troubled corners of the globe. Some of the most important lessons identified include: (1) focusing information-gathering and decision-making conversations on the positive, on the successful, and on what works in resolving conflicts and promoting collaborative understanding, (2) designing conversations which identify windows of opportunity to build success on success, (3) creating dialogical structures which illuminate positive deviation and highlight exceptional experiences that have contributed to building trust, enhancing communications, resolving conflicts, and bridging cultures and viewpoints, and (4) streamlining social design processes such as AI, so that people at all levels can embrace them quickly, easily, and enthusiastically to bring about rapid and positive change.

This chapter explores the multiple boundaries traversed and accompanying acts of translation entailed in the provision of expertise by anthropologists. The chapter begins with an overview of the asylum process, the criteria constituting persecution, and a description of the bureaucracy and procedures by which asylum is determined. The role of expert witness is then introduced with a focus on the rules of federal evidence that paved the way for greater anthropological involvement in the provision of expertise. The next section reviews some of the extant ethnographic literature to date on the asylum process, highlighting the role of dissonance as a recurrent theme in two different respects: the dissonance that occurs between the asylum applicant and the legal setting, and the dissonance that is created between the asylee and his or her body in the aftermath of trauma. The crafting of the affidavit is then analyzed to illustrate the boundary crossings and acts of translation involved in the appraisal and understanding of asylum, including the traversal of difference in scale, temporality, and the construction of social reality, particularly those espoused by anthropology and law. I suggest that contributing to the protection of human rights through the provision of expert witness is a necessary and mutually beneficial collaboration whereby anthropological evidence, insight, and knowledge provide positive content to legal rights. I conclude that anthropologists are uniquely well qualified in the interlocution of persecution, likening the provision of expertise to fieldwork, as a series of border crossings and acts of translation.

The concept of childhoods is both socially constructed and unique to particular social settings. Based on an ethnographic study of five Nepali children’s homes, I argue that the localized contexts of these homes not only exist as spaces where youth negotiate their own unique statuses and futures but also where the social construction and fluidity of childhoods are most evident. By applying sociologist C. Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination,” we become best equipped to understand individual stories within these localized spaces as illustrative of what is ordinary and normalized at the local level, which in turn allows us to envision what is possible for broader society.

Several factors have influenced the pattern of regional development in India. Among these factors, the incidents of terrorist activities, and the resultant disturbance in law and order which have caused serious harm to socioeconomic and business environment are supposed to be crucial. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to find out the extent of damage in economic activities as well as in the process of implementation of regional development programmes caused particularly by the “Maoist Movements” in the “Red Corridors” in India. The emergence of the activists of Maoist groups in some of the poorest districts of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana has given rise to this Red Corridor. In particular, the study attempts to bring into glare how the proneness to Maoist disturbance can jeopardize the objective in terms of fostering rural development in the backward regions of India through the formation of self-help groups (SHGs). In this study, the sample districts have been chosen from the drought-prone and backward regions of West Bengal. Further, these sample districts have been divided into Maoist-prone and non-Maoist-prone areas. The results show that the growth of SHGs formed particularly by the poor women of these areas under the rural development and self-employment program of the government was severely affected by the terrorist activities, and there is a positive correlation between the incidences of defunct SHGs (DSHGs) and the left-wing extremism in Maoist-prone regions of West Bengal during that period.