The World's Longest-Running Insurgencies, Ranked — and Where Nagaland Actually Fits

By BUGLE | July 2026 | Last updated: July 2026

Some wars end in a single dramatic surrender or treaty. Others simply never quite end — they subside into ceasefires, flare back up decades later, and outlive the governments, ideologies, and sometimes the countries that started them. Here are the armed conflicts that have run the longest, what keeps them from resolving, and where the Naga insurgency — the thread running through so much of this blog — actually ranks among them.

What's in this guide

How we're counting, and why this list resists tidy answers · The ranking · A pattern across all of them · Where Nagaland fits · Why these particular fights never quite end

How we're counting, and why this resists a tidy answer

Ranking "longest-running insurgency" is messier than it sounds, and worth being upfront about. Conflicts don't have universally agreed start dates (was Somalia's civil war 1991 or 1981? did Myanmar's Karen conflict begin with 1947's political organizing or 1948's first gunfire?). Many of these fights have gone through ceasefires, lulls, and renewed fighting rather than continuous warfare — "longest-running" often means "longest unresolved," not "longest continuously shooting." And competing claimants for the title actively dispute each other: Philippine politicians have publicly and incorrectly claimed their own communist insurgency as the world's longest, when both the Karen conflict in Myanmar and Colombia's ELN insurgency are older. With that honesty established, here's the list as most conflict researchers and duration-tracking sources currently frame it.

The ranking

• 1. The Karen conflict, Myanmar — since 1948 (77+ years). Widely cited as the world's longest-running civil conflict: the Karen National Union and its armed wing, the KNLA, have fought successive Burmese governments since independence, rooted in colonial-era favoritism toward the Christian Karen minority under British rule and a broken post-independence promise of federal autonomy. Ceasefires (notably 2012) have repeatedly broken down; the conflict has displaced hundreds of thousands into Thai border refugee camps and, per some framings, remains technically unresolved even during its quietest periods.
• 2. The ELN insurgency, Colombia — since 1964 (60+ years). The National Liberation Army, a Marxist guerrilla group, has fought the Colombian state since the 1960s — older than Colombia's better-known FARC, whose 2016 peace deal left the ELN as the country's longest-running active insurgent group, still engaged in sporadic fighting and stalled negotiations.
• 3. The Naxalite-Maoist insurgency, India — since 1967 (58+ years). A Maoist rural insurgency operating across a "Red Corridor" of central and eastern India, born from a 1967 peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari. It has waxed and waned in intensity for decades, drawing international attention after periodic mass-casualty attacks, and remains active in reduced form in 2026.
• 4. The Naga insurgency, India — since 1956 open conflict (roots to the late 1940s; ~70+ years by some countings, ~58+ by others). Often named, alongside Kashmir, as one of independent India's two longest-running internal conflicts. Political organizing began in 1946 under the Naga National Council; a 1951 plebiscite for independence, election boycotts, and a 1956 shift to armed insurgency followed. A ceasefire has held with the main faction since 1997, and a 2015 "Framework Agreement" raised hopes of final settlement — but as of 2026, a comprehensive, signed accord still hasn't materialized, making this arguably a "resolved-in-practice, unresolved-on-paper" case that complicates any clean ranking (our dedicated piece on the Naga peace talks covers this in full, alongside Irom Sharmila's sixteen-year hunger strike protesting the broader military framework around it).
• 5. The Kurdish-Turkish conflict (PKK insurgency) — since 1984 (40+ years). The Kurdistan Workers' Party has fought the Turkish state for decades seeking greater autonomy or independence for Kurdish-majority regions: officially designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and the EU, with recurring rounds of violence and stalled peace processes across four decades.
• 6. The Moro conflict, Philippines — since the 1970s (50+ years by some countings). Muslim Moro separatist movements in the southern Philippines have fought for autonomy or independence since the early 1970s; a 2014 peace agreement created the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, easing but not fully ending associated violence from splinter groups.
• 7. The Communist insurgency, Philippines (CPP-NPA) — since 1969 (55+ years). The Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army, have waged a Maoist rural insurgency since 1969 — frequently, and incorrectly, cited by Philippine politicians as the world's longest, when it's actually younger than both the Karen conflict and Colombia's ELN.

A pattern across all of them

Look across this list and the same structural ingredients recur with striking consistency: a colonial-era administrative or ethnic distinction that hardened into grievance after independence (British favoritism toward the Karen; British "Hills vs. Valley" administration in Manipur and the Northeast generally; arbitrary post-colonial borders splitting Kurdish populations across four states); a broken or ambiguous promise of autonomy made at or shortly after independence, whose exact terms both sides still dispute decades later (Naga leaders and the Indian government still read the 1947 Hydari Agreement's ten-year clause differently; Karen leaders similarly point to unmet federal promises from 1947); and remote, difficult terrain — jungle, mountains, borderlands — that lets a numerically small insurgency sustain itself indefinitely against a much larger state, because total military defeat is nearly impossible and total political capitulation is equally unlikely.

Where Nagaland fits

The Naga insurgency's place on this list is genuinely contested, and that ambiguity is itself instructive. By raw duration since the first political organizing (1946) or the plebiscite (1951), it's among the oldest disputes on this list. By duration of open armed conflict, it's younger than the Karen, ELN, and Naxalite fights. And by current intensity, it's arguably the most resolved of anyone here — a ceasefire has held with the main faction for nearly three decades, statehood was granted back in 1963, and periodic rounds of talks continue toward a final accord. Yet "arguably resolved" isn't the same as "resolved": no comprehensive settlement has been signed, AFSPA (the law Irom Sharmila fasted sixteen years to see repealed) remains partially in force in the region, and sporadic violence — including a 2021 incident in which Indian soldiers killed fourteen civilians in a botched operation — still occurs. It's a useful reminder that "how long has this conflict been going on" often has no single honest number, only a range depending on what, exactly, you're counting as still going on.

Why these particular fights never quite end

The unsatisfying truth about most of the conflicts on this list is that they don't end with victories or clean settlements — they end, when they end at all, through slow attrition of political will on one or both sides, generational fatigue, or a partial accommodation (an autonomous region, a state government, a ceasefire treated as permanent in practice) that leaves the underlying grievance formally unresolved but practically dormant. Mizoram — a neighbor of Nagaland with its own past insurgency — is often cited as the rare case where former insurgents peacefully entered mainstream politics and genuinely closed the chapter; most of the conflicts on this list haven't reached that point, and some, like the Karen conflict, have now outlasted the lifetimes of the leaders who started them.

This piece draws on Wikipedia's List of conflicts by duration, its entries on the Karen and Naga conflicts, VERA Files fact-checking, GlobalPost/PRX reporting, and Swarajya Magazine's analysis of India's Naga policy, current as of July 2026. Start dates and duration claims for ongoing insurgencies are genuinely disputed among sources and are presented here with that uncertainty acknowledged rather than resolved.