Status Updates From Durable Disorder: Understan...

Durable disorder offers little that's genuinely new: writing decades after the fact about a conflict already exhaustively documented and internationalized, he repackages known failures under a fresh label rather than breaking empirical ground. His method leans on anthropomorphizing systemic actors — which lets him assign blame broadly while sidestepping the actual constrained tradeoffs real decision-makers faced.

The author has raised questions at New Delhi's 'developmentalist mindset' again and again and has quite deliberately de-prioritised the security challenges in the so called 'frontier states'. The author bashes the sagacity of the planners who undertook the re-organisation of the State of Assam and much of the criticism seems valid with the advantage of hindsight.

The book reads like research articles with complex sentence constructions singularly intended for academic readers and is certainly not directed at ordinary ones interested in Northeast India.