Building Legitimacy: Exploring State-Society Relations in Northeast India

This book compares two states in the Northeast with different socio-political trajectories—a relatively orderly Mizoram and a troubled Manipur—in order to understand the sources of political turmoil in the region. Taking the region as a case study, it examines the larger debates on success and failure in state-making. In discussing the divergent success of the two states in mitigating conflicts, Hassan demonstrates how in Mizoram the process of state-making helped consolidate public legitimacy a…