Alex Waterman

In 2022, the ceasefire between the Government of India and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim–Isak-Muivah (NSCN–IM) entered its 25th year. While the ceasefire has greatly reduced violence between the group and security forces, it has by no means ended it.

• Published: September 2022
• Strategic Analysis

While the third Bodo accord is a momentous development in the history of the Bodo conflict, caution must be exercised to ensure that it does not fall victim to the factional politics that undermined previous accords.

• Published: February 19, 2020
• Issue Brief

Counterinsurgency (COIN) has long been recognised as a political phenomenon, but current theoretical understandings of politics in COIN reflect ideal types, overlooking the depth and complexity of the politics of insurgency and COIN. Drawing from India’s experience in its northeastern region, this article argues that COIN theory overlooks the political agency and multiplicity of actors, as well as overlooking the fundamentally political scope of interactions that take place between them.

• Published: September 2017
• Strategic Analysis

While decades of counterinsurgency operations and peace processes have taken the sting out of the region’s major insurgencies, collaboration between groups continues to pose security challenges, particularly in the exploitable border areas adjacent to the upper Sagaing Region of Northwest Myanmar.

• Published: August 10, 2017
• IDSA Comments

The perception management component of information warfare has long been recognised as an important tool of warfare, appearing in military doctrines worldwide. The challenges and opportunities of its practice in different political contexts have however rarely merited substantive attention. This article examines the development and trajectory of two cutting-edge examples of contemporary information warfare practice: Russian information warfare in Ukraine (2014–present); and information warfare conducted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) up to and during Operation Protective Edge.

• Published: January 2017
• Journal of Defence Studies

Partly the result of a political and physical isolation compounded by decades of conflict in the region, Northeast India is often viewed through the prism of security studies, institutional performance or developmental governance. While important contributions in themselves, a state-centric focus often overlooks the complexity of the causes and dynamics. It ignores the consequences of regional societal forces’ articulation of identity, nationalism, separatism and sovereignty that can shape political boundaries in the region, thus overlooking the salience of subaltern narratives.

• Published: January 2017
• Strategic Analysis