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...