This chapter introduces the book. It begins with an examination of the many different types of violence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, from insurgencies and terrorist attacks to violence within society; extant approaches to explaining violence and conflict cannot explain such variety within national borders. It introduces the patchwork states framework: the notion that the spatial politics of competition and conflict can be traced back to state-building under colonial rule, and postcolonial revisions to that rule. It then lays out the ways in which colonial administrators established different forms of governance arrangements across the Indian subcontinent as a response to greed, fear, and frugality. Postcolonial governments attempted to revise these arrangements, but with limited success, yielding differences in state capacity and state–society relations within India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The chapter then introduces the ways in which differences in governance leads to legible patterns of political violence at the local level – including the incidence of sovereignty-contesting and sovereignty-neutral violence –– as well as the broader politics of conflict and competition, impacting electoral and development outcomes. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the implications of the argument and outlining subsequent chapters.