Militarised Urbanism

Scholarship on North East India heavily foregrounds on ethnicity, conflicts and resolution customary laws and tradition (under)development, insurgency, identity politics, political autonomy movements, subnationalism, and tribes, among others. These themes are often caught in a cyclic process in knowledge production and theorisation, leaving an interregnum crisis in North East Indian studies. However, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur, co-authored by Dolly Kikon and Duncan McDuie-Ra, offers a new theoretical lens to understand the social reality unfolding in a tribal city, often absent in academic discourses. The book offers a new framework for studying tribal cities in the frontier, which is often misplaced in academia. Kikon and McDuie-Ra take readers to Dimapur by unfolding the socio-politico and economic spheres with rich ethnographic insights, wherein they skilfully weave in people’s relationship to their surroundings through sound (music), movement (hunting), and loss (dying). The book is divided into two parts besides the introduction and epilogue.

Frontier and Tribal City