Indian prof gets Peace Institute's fellowship

Washington, Sept 1: Prof Shivaji Mukherjee, working in the Political Science Department of the Yale University, has been awarded the US Institute of Peace's (USIP) Jennings Randolph Fellowship for 2007-2008.

For his dissertation, he chose to write about the Maoist problem in India, according to a press release from the USIP. It said each fellow was working on a timely and important project related to priority conflicts and issues for US foreign policy and the international community, including Iraq, West Asia, Iran, relations with the Muslim world, media and conflict and more.

The central question of Prof Mukherjee's dissertation was why some civil wars lasted longer than others and why they tended to be low intensity.

While some recent literature pointed to difficulties for rebels in committing to peace agreements, or conceptualised rebels as lobbyists for their ethnic constituencies, Prof Mukherjee theorised that colonial and post-colonial state-building processes caused the state to intentionally neglect the provision of public goods in certain areas, thus, producing enclaves of state failure surrounded by areas where the state was strong in terms of penetration and extraction.

Rebels then systematically entered those enclaves and provided public goods to win support from disadvantaged populations including tribals and lower caste communities. As long as rebels did not cross a certain threshold of violence, the state did not use its full counter-insurgency capacity.

Prof Mukherjee, fluent in Hindi and Bengali, would be allowed to conduct fieldwork in certain states in India with Maoist problem like Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and West Bengal.

UNI