Jason Miklian

Hearts and mines: A district-level analysis of the Maoist conflict in India:

India’s rapid economic growth over the last decade has been coupled with a Maoist insurgency that competes with the state for rural allegiance. In response to the threat, the Government of India has securitized development, using public works programmes in an attempt to sway locals away from Maoist allegiance. However, these areas are also home to massive iron and coal mines that drive India’s growth. This study aims to address the lack of local-level analysis and the lack of a robust dataset by merging qualitative fieldwork with disparate district-level conflict data sources to explore different potential explanatory variables for the Maoist insurgency, including the relationship between development works, violence, and natural resource extraction. We find that while effective implementation of development programmes is loosely related to the immediate suppression of violent activities in Maoist-affected districts, and under certain conditions mining activity increases the likelihood for conflict, it is the presence of scheduled caste and tribal communities that is the best predictor of violence.

Revolutionary conflict in federations: the Indian case

Federations promise to provide autonomous, representative governance that is flexible enough to overcome potential internal conflict resulting from the dual stresses of governing diverse populations and power overreach. India is the worlds biggest federation but also hosts the most violent revolution in modern history against a federal state. Since 2004, 150,000 people have been killed or displaced in the war between the Communist Party of India-Maoist and Indias government. Conflict management efforts led not to resolution but catastrophe across Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand as state responses contradicted each other and the centres efforts. The differences illustrated how institutional mechanisms of decentralisation create, sustain and otherwise alter internal revolutionary conflicts that cross subunit boundaries. Three unique characteristics come into play when federal governments tackle revolutionary conflict: picking from subunit actions like policy buffets, exacerbation of state–subunit fissures and empowerment of local elites who put political self-interest above conflict resolution.

Corruption, Justice and Violence in Democratic India

Institutionalized corruption is pervasive in India. It requires individuals and businesses to negotiate bureaucratic mazes, pay off government servants, and break laws merely to acquire the basic elements of governance. With nearly half of Indias economic activity in the informal sector, shadow economies permeate the lives of every citizen. What on the surface looks like a dysfunctional or broken system operates smoothly and beneficially for the politicians, businesses, and connected individuals who use it with ease. For the average Indian citizen, however, access is challenging, and corruption is a visible reminder of the failed promise of democracy. This article broadens the anti-corruption agenda in India by recognizing how corruption carries with it ingrained structural components that cannot be disentangled from the formal sector. In some cases, what is thought of as corruption actually improves operational efficiency for citizens when compared to Indias overworked judiciary and extensive bureaucracy. Any serious attempt to fix corruption must also account for the rationalizations of individuals and companies that engage in what are commonly seen as corrupt activities.

The perils of ‘going local’: liberal peace-building agendas in Nepal

Responding to recent critiques, foreign aid organisations are increasingly ‘going local’ in their operations in order to integrate local actors into their peace-building and aid projects. This is done under the belief that entering into partnerships directly with grassroots actors will increase local autonomy in joint ventures, thus empowering locals as agents of change both during and after the project period. But despite its normative and conceptual appeal, we argue that this model is not workable in practice and cannot be under the current structural conditions of the international aid environment. This is due to a fundamental disconnect between the conceptualisation and rationale of ‘going local’ and the structural and institutional frameworks within which ‘local ownership’ is supposed to be operationalised and implemented. This paper uses the example of Nepal to illustrate that this disconnect not only prevents foreign aid organisations from reaching their stated goals, but exacerbates the very problems that ‘going local’ is supposed to address.

Moving media and conflict studies beyond the CNN effect

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

The Political Ecology of War in Maoist India

War, business, and democracy can intersect in complex ways. In India, mining companies operate throughout a warzone between the government and a Maoist insurgency. Mining companies promised that their activities would benefit local populations, but over-reliance on the government to implement development initiatives eroded public faith. The Maoists used the implementation gap to recruit fighters and build public support through an anti-state and anti-corporate ideology. While traditional political ecology interpretations often blame corporations alone for negative mining consequences, this article explores how governance failures can also act as conflict triggers in mining districts. Understanding the interrelation effects between these actors can enable a broader understanding of not only the Maoist conflict in India but also how the political ecology of war influences business and conflict dynamics in resource-rich but war-ridden developing states.

Mapping Business-Peace Interactions: Five Assertions for How Businesses Create Peace

The conjunction of business and peace is a growing global phenomenon, but conducted and researched over a vast array of fields and contextual settings. This article provides theoretical order for this disparate material, illustrating cutting-edge research and highlighting the most urgent knowledge gaps to fill. Extracting findings from the business community, international organizations, and the academic community, this article maps these findings into five assertions about how businesses impact upon peace: economic engagement facilitates a peace dividend; encouraging local development facilitates local capacities for peace; importing international norms improves democratic accountability; firms can constrain the drivers or root causes of conflict; and undertaking direct diplomatic efforts with conflict actors builds and/or makes peace. These assertions provide a framework for categorizing and testing prominent business-peace arguments. They also support preliminary arguments that businesses cannot expect to be rewarded as peacebuilders just because they undertake peacebuilding activities, that economic opening only brings as much peace as a local regime will allow, and that truly courageous business-peace choices are rarely made in fragile contexts. This framework can encourage more coherent scholarly findings and more effective business engagements within the complex and challenging realm of peacebuilding.

The Past, Present and Future of the ‘Liberal Peace’

Abstract The stunted and stumbling progress of the ‘liberal peace’ philosophy since 1990 tells a complex story. In this article, I give a history of the liberal peace project from its academic and activist origins to today’s global application, discussing how policymakers and liberal peace architects see liberal peacebuilding, and how emerging powers such as India and China relate to these goals. I close with a discussion of the future of liberal peacebuilding, the ‘Business for Peace’ paradigm and how relationships between powerful states and their peripheries will still matter despite a more consolidated international aid community.

Multinational enterprises, risk management, and the business and economics of peace

Purpose n n n n nThe purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize how managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) manage risk, particularly in fragile and/or conflict-affected areas of operation. The authors suggest that MNEs consider reducing risk at its source rather than trying to avoid or react to risks as they occur. By incorporating peacebuilding strategies, managers may not only reduce investment risk but also contribute to stability and prosperity in the communities where they operate, and gain a competitive advantage in doing so. n n n n nDesign/methodology/approach n n n n nThe authors show how firms can take a more holistic approach to working in conflict-affected areas. They do so by overlaying conceptualizations of risk with those of peacebuilding and then use case examples to illustrate how such actions work in practice. n n n n nFindings n n n n nUsing a series of examples, the authors find that MNEs that incorporate peacebuilding frameworks in their risk calculations in complex settings tend to have a better understanding of local environments and how they affect firm operations and profitability. These same MNEs may hold a long-term advantage over international competitors that do not share the same understanding. n n n n nOriginality/value n n n n nThe authors argue that the study of relationships between international businesses and society in conflict-affected or fragile areas of operation is under-developed and tends to focus on negative (risk-aversion) aspects as opposed to positive (value-added) opportunities. This paper offers new ways in which these relationships can be reconceptualized. The authors’ main takeaway is that a peacebuilding approach does not require corporations to be arbitrators of peace at the expense of profit. Rather, it is instead a broader way to conceptualize and weigh risk when working in the world’s most challenging regions. This approach is more likely to be in the long-term interest of both the firm and the local society where the firm operates.

Conflict, Peacekeeping, and Humanitarian Security: Understanding Violent Attacks Against Aid Workers

ABSTRACT What factors explain attacks on humanitarian aid workers? Most research has tended to describe trends rather than analyse the underlying reasons behind attacks. To move this agenda forward, we present to our knowledge the first peer-reviewed cross-national time-series study that identifies factors related to violent attacks on humanitarian aid workers. Our theoretical framework explores two sets of potential explanatory factors: dynamics of conflicts; and the politicization and militarization of humanitarian operations. Using a global sample at the country level from 1997 to 2014, our results suggest that: (i) the presence and severity of armed conflicts are related to increased attacks on aid workers; (ii) aid workers do not appear to face greater risks even where civilians are targeted; (iii) the presence of an international military force does not appear to add to nor decrease risks to aid workers; and (iv) the effects of peacekeeping operations upon humanitarian security are varied. We discuss this in light of the ongoing challenges facing humanitarian organizations to provide security in fragile and conflict-affected areas.