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ravel 20 km or so west of Narayanpur in
Chhattisgarh, and you will find yourself in one of the
last unsurveyed stretches of dense forests in Central
India. It is a charming place with gurgling streams and cool air,
things that residents of urban India never get. But beyond the
idyllic setting is a deadly reality: the forests of abhujmaad—or
‘the unknown’—are also home to maoists who routinely blow
up roads or any infrastructure that can allow the penetration
of government in the area.
It is an ideal geographic setting for what Jakub Grygiel calls
an ungoverned space. These are regions where the writ of gov-
ernments does not extend and are often the haunt of people
and groups opposed to the very idea of a state. Nomadic,
loosely tied together by kinship (or a leader) and happy plun-
dering settled territories, these groups were once consigned
to history. By the 17th century, when modern states began
dotting the map, these regions began shrinking. By the middle
of the 20th century, there were virtually no such places left: all
the space on maps had been claimed by nation-states.
This is the theme of Grygiel’s new book, Return of the
Barbarians: Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient
Rome to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2018). a
state department official who was until recently a scholar at
Johns Hopkins University, the author notes, ‘Since the early
1990s, many regions, vacated by the superpowers, became
heavily destabilized, collapsing into a cycle of violence and
turmoil. In Sub-Saharan and east africa, as well as Southeast-
ern europe and Central asia, states and their governments
either disintegrated or lost their ability to impose order within
their own territories.’
He highlights two reasons for the return of ungoverned
spaces. ‘First, despite appearing on maps as clearly delimited
entities, many modern states are frail and incapable of exert-
ing control over their territories in several regions of the world.
Second, new communications technologies are allowing the
rapid organization of large groups outside of states’ purview.’
For anyone observing South asia, India and Pakistan
quickly come to mind. after gaining independence in 1947,
the two new countries left untouched the colonial apparatus
of governing far-flung tribal areas. In Nehru’s India, this lack
of control was covered by an elaborate excuse that tribal
people should be allowed to develop according to ‘their own
genius’. This effectively kept these areas out of the purview of
industrialisation and economic growth elsewhere.
The reality was that India did not have the administrative
wherewithal to bring places such as Bastar, vast tracts of as-
sam, the North east Frontier agency (NeFa)—as arunachal
Pradesh was known then—and other regions under effective
control. India’s strategy evolved over time from efforts at cen-
tralised control—at times directly by the ministry of external
affairs, as in the case of Nagaland—until ‘routine politics’ set
in. This was followed by granting of statehood, local legisla-
tive assemblies and representation in Parliament. But over
and above these normal features, a large swathe of territory in
these areas is considered autonomous (with special gover-
nance features such as extensive freedoms from interference
by state governments, as codified under the Sixth Schedule of
the Constitution).
This effectively brings matters to square one: these
areas remain ungoverned in Grygiel’s sense. On paper, local
councils have extensive powers; in reality they lack the
political and administrative experience to run the territoryWaiting for the Barbarians
The retreat of states and the politics of the future
Saurabh Singhbooks