India is often credited for its success as the world's largest democracy, but variation in subnational democracy across its states has not been systematically incorporated into scholarship on subnational regimes. This paper develops a conceptualization of subnational democracy based on four constitutive dimensionsturnover, contestation, autonomy and clean electionsand introduces a comprehensive dataset to measure each of the dimensions between 1985 and 2013. The inclusion of Indiaan older parliamentary democracy with a centralized federal systembroadens the universe of cases for the study of subnational regimes, and reveals variation across constitutive dimensions that has not yet been theorized. The paper shows that threats to subnational democracy come from multiple directions, including the central government and non-state armed actors, that subnational variation persists even decades after a transition at the national-level, and that subnational democracy declines in some states in spite of the national democratic track record.

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The question of how we can grasp entanglements and detachments as researchers who are intimately entangled with the worlds we study was never solely an issue of academic curiosity. This past year we struggled to keep up with the shifting grounds as the global pandemic escalated political crises and generated ruptures and losses in our lives, societies and universities, in ways that touched some more than others. In the midst of this disorientation, we have grappled with and failed to make sense of the politics of the present. Having the space to think through these politics with you and with each-other has meant much more to us than an academic exercise. It has held the space for us to think, feel and make sense together, entangled within a power-laden and at times alienating university system that nevertheless contains the possibility for different, if not better, realities.The 2020 Millennium conference, 'Entanglements and Detachments in Global Politics', held online 22-24 October, was a rich and generative series of conversations, involving over 3,000 registered participants and 150 presentations. Our intention for the conference and this special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies is to intervene in debates on relationality, which form a necessary, although conservative, corrective to the atomic universe of traditional IR and its deadly international order. Where relational approaches often retain a sense of neatness and order, if not in theory, then in practice, we put forward the urgent need to move even further away from parsimony, into the complex and messy stuff that constitutes our worlds. For some, the entanglement of societies, species and environments has never been about making a comfortable theoretical point. They have always been aware that what is at stake in contesting separation is

Electoral violence is perpetrated by anti-systemic actors opposed to the democratic system, as well as by those vying for power through the electoral process. Even though the motivations for violent tactics are distinct, we do not know whether intra- and anti-systemic violence differ in their effects. Focusing on state-level elections in India – a country that combines nationwide elections with persistent political violence – we demonstrate that the distinction is crucial for understanding spatial patterns of electoral violence and effects on election outcomes. Based on an original dataset of violence in legislative assembly elections between 1985 and 2008, we show that both tactics depress turnout overall but that the effect is larger for anti-systemic violence. Intra-systemic violence not only appears to be more selectively targeted, as it is more likely to occur in constituencies where the incumbent belongs to the state-level opposition, but also generates electoral benefits for the party in control of state government.

This article argues that in order to understand how bodily impressions shape ways of knowing and being, researchers need to enhance claims of positionality through a language of intercorporeality. The notion of positionality is used to indicate the inherent situatedness and partiality of knowledge, but positionality statements also risk affirming a hierarchical narrative structure, leaving out how knowledge is indelibly and dynamically impressed by bodily others, thereby reinscribing researcher authority. Strengthening attempts to resist mastery in doing research, this article theorizes the intercorporeality of research practice on the basis of the bodily experiences of being there, being moved, and being vulnerable. These insights into the intercorporeality of research practice emerge from fieldwork across the West Bank, the Naqab desert, and alongside the Gaza fence. This article argues that intercorporeal vulnerability is at the core of cultivating knowledge, which emerges not only through willful action, but also through nonintentional rapport with objects and (non)human others. Understanding this vulnerability restores a sense of openness and uncertainty by appreciating research practice as always “in excess” of established categories and always just beyond the researcher's positional mastery.