Abstract

I conclude this book with a reflection on the ways Nagaland exemplifies the making and unmaking of borders – cartographic, legal, and cultural – and the ways this ongoing process creates new forms of liberation and marginalization that inform critical approaches to gender, place, and identity.

Keywords: borderlands, anxiety, gender

Nagaland exemplifies a contemporary borderland emerging from decades of armed conflict. The state shares an extended and porous border with Burma, as well as borders with the neighbouring Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Manipur. These borders are contested, often violently, by state governments attempting wrestle control of valuable resource pools and border communities. Nagaland's borders are also contested by non-state actors within Nagaland who reject the state's 1963 map entirely in favour of an alternative map, ‘Nagalim’, which includes territory in surrounding states and across the international border with Myanmar. Since India's Independence in 1947, Nagaland has been mired in conflict between the Government of India and Naga nationalist groups agitating for various forms of autonomy and sovereignty. This conflict is rooted in histories of difference and distance to the Indian state centre, and like conflicts in many other borderlands, involved a protracted and draconian state response marked by militarization, exceptional laws, and targeting suspect populations for perceived subversion and resistance. Throughout this conflict, Naga nationalist groups divided along ideological and tribal lines into competing factions, and targeted the Naga public in paranoid efforts to weed out suspected spies and traitors, and predatory efforts to extort money, food and shelter. Since ceasefires were signed in the late 1990s and early 2000s between the Government of India and two of the largest Naga nationalist factions, the borderland state has hosted a tense peace-conflict continuum. This tense peace is marked by a layered and complex milieu of sovereign actors, including the Nagaland state government and various Naga nationalist groups, a parallel militarized state that exists above and outside of state law, and local customary institutions enshrined and protected under Indian Constitutional law. As Nagaland's decades of conflict are being brought to a close, changes are taking place in the state that reflect changes taking place in other South and Southeast Asian borderlands.

Post-conflict changes in Nagaland offer a window to understanding how politics, gender and anxiety intersect in a borderland state experiencing rapid social, political, and economic developments.