Description: Remaking the State examines how development becomes a tool of governance in India's counterinsurgency efforts, with a particular focus on women's experiences in the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal. Through a rich ethnography of the state's non-military response to Maoist insurgency, the book explores how policies designed to win "hearts and minds" intersect with gendered assumptions of empowerment and pacification. Kamra shows how programmes like Muktidhara, a microcredit initiative for rural women, function as mechanisms of both governance and negotiation, as women respond not with resistance, but with strategic engagement. Situating these dynamics within broader histories of colonial and postcolonial state-making in insurgent margins, the book develops a compelling framework for understanding how states are remade from both above and below. Bridging political science, feminist development studies, and critical security studies, this volume offers a timely intervention in debates on democracy, sovereignty, and gendered governance in South Asia.
Brief description: Lipika Kamra is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests concern the state, development, democracy, and the politics of the digital in India. More specifically, she examines how states and citizens interact in insurgency and counterinsurgency contexts; how women mediate the terrain of development and democracy; and how digital media shapes everyday politics. She is currently co-authoring Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics, WhatsApp and Democracy in India, forthcoming in 2025 with Bristol University Press.
Review Quotes: 'In this sensitive and thoughtful ethnography, Lipika Kamra shows the everyday and the spectacular ways ordinary Indian women negotiate their lives and well-being with a state that wages a relentless counterinsurgency against them, garbed in the cloak of development. A must read on the quotidian practices of state-making and self-fashioning.' Laleh Khalili, Author of Life in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies