Jugdep S. Chima is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hiram College, Ohio, USA. He was previously a Lecturer of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Associate Editor for South Asia at Asian Survey at the same institution. He is author of The Sikh Separatist Insurgency in India: Political Leadership & Ethnonationalist Movements (2010).
In this edited volume editor Jugdip S. Chima and the book's various contributors have produced a valuable addition to the literature on insurgency. The book is useful on two fronts. The first is as a descriptive and historical guide to the most severe and intractable of South Asia's dizzying number of insurgencies. In addition to the introduction and conclusion there are eight chapters that separately deal with ethnic insurrections in Kashmir, Assam, Punjab, northeast India, Sri Lanka, Balochistan, the Chittagong Hills in Bangladesh, and one chapter that covers Maoist ideological insurgencies in India, Pakistan and Nepal. These well-written and deeply analytical chapters provide an important resource to researchers of insurgency on purely historical grounds. Of even greater importance is how the volume draws common lessons from the disparate case studies that offer important insights into ethnic subnationalist insurgencies as a phenomenon. William R. Patterson Independent Scholar, Interdisciplinary Political Studies, Issue 5(1) 2019