Neoliberal Capitalism and Ethno-Territoriality in Highland Northeast India

Resource-Extraction, Capitalist Desires and Ethnic Closure

Bibliographic Data

ID3948218
AuthorsJelle J P Wouters (Royal University of Bhutan, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume28
Issue1
Pages99-121
Publication date2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2020.1812581
OpenAlexW3081808548
LanguageEN
Citations received23
References cited58

In this article, I examine the relationship between state, ethnicity, territoriality and neoliberal capitalism in the tribal areas of highland Northeast India, where I focus in particular on the socioecological and socio-political corollaries of its rediscovery as a resource and capitalist frontier. In so doing, I apply (capitalist) ‘desire’ and (ethnic) ‘closure’ as key analytics to capture the contentiously unfolding history of the region’s present. This article shows how new resource and capital flows lead both to the production of capitalist ‘desires’ and socioecological destruction through the privatization, acquisition and depletion, mostly by ethnic tribal elites, of communal assets now embedded in newly capitalist relations, and to the intensification of a politics of exclusive ethnoterritorial belonging and rights. The latter comes in the form of volatile social processes of ethnic ‘closure’; an increasing preoccupation, that is, on part of tribal ethnic communities with the protecting, patrolling and legislating of ethno-territorial rights. The upshot of this is a dialectic between new neoliberal connectivities and ethnic ‘closure’, one that ensues in a frame of the specifics of governance and law in highland Northeast India

Capitalism · Ethnic group · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Resource curse · Sociology · Territoriality · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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