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Juhi Tyagi (Picture: private)Juhi Tyagi has a PhD in Sociology from Stony Brook University, New York where she worked on resilience in armed movements. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt, Germany. Before starting her doctoral program, Juhi worked for several years doing research and advocacy in regions of political conflict in India. She has a Masters in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Her research interests include social movements, insurgency, complex organizations, gender, economic sociology, and development. She has published is several peer reviewed journals such as “Mobilization", “The Sociological Quarterly", “Economic and Political Weekly", and “Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations".How do you explain your current research projects to your students?I work on radical social movements. For thepast decade and a half, at least, this issue has found constant mention in the media.Everybody has read or, if not, heard about the pervasive presence of violentgroups. These accounts have almost always been from the state perspective,focusing on the need and type of military counter-operations against rebelforces. Think of what you have read about American intervention in Iraq, about statecounter-insurgency operations against terrorists in Syria, in Columbia; thelist goes on. I introduce my topic to students by askingthem how we define a terrorist and what constitutes a terrorist act. I ask themto consider what configurations of power and social structures lead to thecreation of radical groups and their definition as terrorist. This is not a newquestion by any means. In fact, even a recent mainstream Indian film had aleading protagonist question the court about its definition of terrorism,asking why systematic violence against dalitsor the annihilation of adivasis (tribals)in the name of development were not considered terrorist acts; despite fittingthe broader definition of being an unlawful use of violence and intimidation. As a sociologist my aim is, through an analysis of the largest radical movement in India, to investigate and understand these groups in their entirety, including the structural systems that facilitate or abate their formations. The Maoists in India, for instance, were formed under the name of Naxalites in the 1970s. They continue to operate in several parts of India, demonstrating resilience. I look beyond state narratives of violence, carefully analyzing the existing political economy, types of class and caste networks, and non-violent (hence often neglected) organizational mechanisms used by such groups. I find that violent movements sustain themselves only when they painstakingly spend time forming local organizations that create and work on class-based networks. When these village class-networks are left to operate relatively autonomously, it enables the movement to align their ideologies with local needs, adequately address people’s problems through effective communication channels, and create what I call long-standing infrastructures of protest.In discussing my research, I try to infuse students with a sense of inquiry and curiosity about current systems of inequality and injustice. To enable students to systematically seek to analyse the operation of capitalism within which groups enter conflicts, to learn to identify the mechanisms operating within these systems that produce competing interests and certain development practices. It also nudges students, as critical individuals, to think about viable forms of resistance, like the implications of the Occupy movements eschewing organizations, which my research points are crucial in movement sustenance.What were academic or personal inspirations that led to your current research?I grew up in India. In the 10th grade, I began to help a friend’s mother with her research on obstetric health of rural women in the state of Karnataka, where I lived. What started as a summer project opened my mind to so many complexities. Women’s health was so deeply embedded within caste, class and gender inequalities. You couldn’t just create a government scheme that effectively improved the health of women without addressing patriarchy, low wages, and land ownership inequalities. A few years later, I enrolled myself for a Masters in Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies (in The Hague), to go deeper into some of these issues. It was a great program. I interacted with activists, development practitioners and academics from all over the world and returned to India, inspired and armed with a broader perspective than before. I became determined to start working on and learning about other rural contexts within the country. I joined a small non-profit research team called Aman (meaning peace) that worked in areas of political conflict in India. This took me to states like Bihar and Kashmir. It was my five years spent in the villages there that pushed me to pursue my current research on radical movements. I could see that these regions faced persistent gender, caste, class and religious injustice, but had equally complex movements as responses to their situation. I had read about these movements in the newspapers where they had always been represented as violent actors coercing local people. It is really only when you travel to these areas that you see a more complex side to how they work.When I began my PhD at SUNY, Stony Brook, I found a great mentor inMichael Schwartz. He was as excited and convinced in my research question abouthow violent movements sustain themselves—and we both agreed that the answer probablylay beyond focusing on questions that had been asked thus far, specifically thetiming and type of violent acts by these groups. We hypothesized that groupsthat attained some degree of longevity must be doing something more, somethingthat entangled their organization with the villagers – who were the entitiesthat could best sustain the movement. This led to my inquiry into theorganizational networks necessary for these movements to become resilient, andbeyond that to ask if and when these movements won anything for the poorestthey claimed to represent. Both Michael and I believed that any research shouldalways aim to ask big questions: about inequality, injustice, and the workingof power structures. That it should matter for understanding and improving theplight of the most immiserated. Working on movements that intended to overthrowexisting unequal power structures certainly met that goal.  How are you ‘doing’ research? What are your most important research methods (interviews, archives, excavations…?)I have relied on spending time in the field: both to define my questionsand to find my answers. With a topic like mine, it can be both physically andemotionally draining to be in the field for extended periods, but for the samereasons, it can also always be very valuable and gratifying. I combined, in alimited way, the traditional style of ethnography, where you spend timeobserving people and their lives, with a more mobile open ended interview methodthat took me to over seventy villages. I spent time speaking with currentcadre, surrendered militants and non-movement village members, using snowballsampling to locate these villages; some being in very remote areas locatedwithin dense forests. On several occasions, I failed to win the trust of thevillage and left without gathering any information. Building relationships withpeople takes time and in each situation there are different reasons for whypeople welcome you into their life and tell you their stories. Some wereconvinced by my previous work in the villages, some by my academicqualifications and research question, and others by the fact that if I as asingle woman from the city had borne the hardship to live a village life formonths, they owed it to me to tell me their stories.  I lived in villages in threedistinct districts where I conducted the field work for my current book, over aperiod of sixteen months in 2013-2014. I compared villages that had a sustained movement presence to thosewith an episodic presence and those that had no movement at all, both withinand across districts. The logic behind this method was to control forstructural factors, so that I could safely narrow down on other (non-structural)causal mechanisms that proved crucial in the sustained movement villages. Technically,this is known as using the method ofdifference and the method ofagreement. I also relied on archives such as district gazettes to build thehistorical context informing contemporary economic and social arrangements. Lastly,I created and worked with a unique quantitative dataset which would not only allowme to triangulate my results but also allow me to directly address most‘terrorism’ scholarship that has been predominantly quantitative, based on the numberof casualties and amount of property damage. Using my field observations, Icoded all major English newspaper dailies in India for the years 2000 to 2012that made any mention of the Maoists. But instead of coding for just casualtyor violent data, I created an elaborate coding for organizational strength ofthe movement on the ground. So, if villagers were caught storing arms for therebels in their house, I knew (from my ethnographic research) that this indicatedthe presence of informational networks of the movement on the ground. Hence, backedwith my field data, I started to code every Maoist story for what it indicatedof the relationship and organizational structure of the movement in thevillages. If the Maoists were threatening or killing civilians for beinginformers, or blasting school buildings, for instance, I saw it as an indicatorof negative or very weak movement-village relations.       I found, in both my qualitative and quantitative analysis, that it wasthe creation of relatively autonomous local village organizations thatultimately helped sustain a movement. Areas with negative or weak movementorganizational presence (plunging the group into indiscriminate andillegitimate violence, categorized as terrorism) failed to find longevity.Which publications or academic events (workshops, conferences, lecture series…) did inspire you recently?This year marked 200 years of Marx. I was fortunate to be in Germany,which is host to several excellent conferences around it. This includes the largefive day conference held in Berlin in May that attracted academics andactivists from all over the world. Marx remains relevant today and it is necessaryto debate and discuss the mechanisms and functioning of capitalism that hewrote about so extensively. My new project on how radical social movementsaffect the trajectory of capitalism is tied to a resurgence in these debates onforms and variations in capitalism. In this context, I have also found both historicalaccounts on processes in the rise of commodities such as cotton, like the book,The Global History of Cotton by SteveBeckett as well as anthropological accounts on the local functioning of global commoditysupply chains such as Anna Tsing’s article, SupplyChains and the Human Condition, to be fascinating.In my new project on movements and trajectories, I am comparing twopredominantly cotton growing areas to understand their diverse trajectories tocapitalism. One, a region that witnessed the presence of a radical socialmovement and another that was marked by its absence. The works and workshops Imentioned have inspired me to ask questions about how the production systems ofcertain commodities led to the creation of certain structures of socialrelations and inequalities, about how capitalism can and does use, and exasperate,existing inequalities to its end. Another piece that convincingly argues alongthese lines is Vivek Chibber’s book, Postcolonialtheory and the Specter of Capitalism. Chibber’s new venture with RobertBrenner and in collaboration with Jacobin, the journal Catalyst, has also been publishing brilliant and extremelyinspiring and relevant articles.      Do you think that academic mobility changes the way in which research projects are conceptualized? What are your personal experiences in this regard?If you mean, conducting research in different geographical regions andengaging with scholars and activists across various disciplines and countries –absolutely! I have been at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, which actively pursues theagenda of interdisciplinary exchange, for the past year. I have always foundsome interesting historical or theoretical insights to take home or interestingresearch methods that I could apply to my own work. Another advantage incross-disciplinary or cross-regional exchange has been the emphasis it puts onyou as a scholar to convey your ideas with utmost clarity and efficacy. Withthe crutch of jargons and discipline specific formulations gone, you become a clearerand more accessible thinker, and as a result researcher.      My research has also gained from interacting with the world at large, indifferent geographical regions. I have spent a considerable amount of time inthe US and now Europe. Taking the time to interact with local environments, talkingto the recently arrived refugees in Germany or with minority groups in de-industrializedcities in the US has, for instance, made me think more globally about thesources of conflict, finding many links and connections. This has made merealize that there is so much more research we need to do! Citation: “I Aim to Ask Big Questions: About Inequality, Injustice, and Power Structures” – 5in10 with Juhi Tyagi, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 04.10.2018, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/13350.