ABSTRACT
Commentators have written copiously on the de-escalation of conflict in the region, even though most of them agree that this has been the result of pacification. The shift from state-orchestrated to market mechanisms of distribution overlapped with new forms of social movement-based struggles in which the old autonomy question was merely reformulated, not abandoned. More importantly, territorial autonomies along ethnic lines have been created throughout the last twenty years within the states of the region. The autonomous arrangements have been part of the governance structure in the north-eastern states of Assam, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. The role played by women, in Nagaland at least, poses the issue of a certain kind of public ethics of self-government growing out of the dynamics of subject-formation through conflict governance. The problem of 'government of peace', like any other self-styled mode of good governance, is that it will have to deal with different subjects.
