Sanjib Baruah is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College. His publications include India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2005); and Postfrontier Blues: Towards a New Policy Framework for Northeast India (East-West Center, 2007). He has edited Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Ethnonationalism in India: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2010). His opinion pieces appear in the Indian Express and other newspapers. 

Bodhisattva Kar is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies in the University of Capetown. He received his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Before joining the UCT in 2012, he taught and held fellowships at Amsterdam, Berlin, Calcutta, Mexico City, Oxford, and Paris. His research interests include histories of development and disciplines; primitivism; nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of South and South East Asia; connected and comparative histories of frontiers; nationalist formations; and joint–stock companies.

Nosheen Ali is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Gallatin School, NYU. She is the author of Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which offers the first in-depth study of state power, citizenship and social struggle in Gilgit-Baltistan, a contested terrain that forms part of the disputed borderland of Kashmir.

Lydia Walker is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History at Leiden University and affiliated scholar at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (New Delhi) and the Highland Institute (Kohima, Nagaland). A historian of decolonization,   her book manuscript, States-in-Waiting, shows how nationalisms that did not achieve statehood – such as Nagas in Northeast India – sought informal sources of international recognition. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Historical Review, Past & Present, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, The Washington Post, and elsewhere 
 
This book discussion launches a three-year Global Asia project on Troubled National Territories. (See our website for more on our projects.) This project concerns areas where incorporation into national state territory has been traumatic during the militant state pursuit of national unity and security inside the global legal framework of national sovereignty. Each case is unique, with its own history and meanings, but they together reveal facets of national territory that enrich understandings of Asia’s globalization.