Mapping Ethnic Fault Lines in Northeast India : Identity, Territory and Inter-Community Relations

Northeast India is often described through its extraordinary ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity. Yet diversity in the region is not simply a matter of coexistence; it is also deeply connected to questions of political identity, land, territory, belonging and recognition. Across the region, relationships between communities have been shaped by colonial legacies, migration, state-making, competing territorial claims, demands for autonomy, and changing understandings of who belongs where. Recent episodes of violence, displacement and political mobilisation have once again brought these underlying fault lines to the centre of public and academic debate.
This panel seeks to bring together scholarship that examines how ethnic boundaries are formed, reproduced, negotiated and transformed across Northeast India. Rather than treating ethnic conflict as a series of isolated or purely security-related events, the panel invites papers that explore the everyday political and social processes through which communities construct identities, define territories and negotiate relationships with one another.
We particularly welcome papers examining questions of ethnic identity and belonging; territoriality and competing claims over land; inter-community relations; migration and demographic change; state and non-state institutions; autonomy movements and political mobilisation; displacement and resettlement; memory and historical narratives; gender and community politics; and the changing relationship between ethnic identities and democratic institutions.
The panel is open to comparative and case-based studies from across Northeast India, including but not limited to Manipur, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh. We also welcome theoretically informed and interdisciplinary contributions that connect developments in the Northeast with wider debates on ethnic politics, subnationalism, citizenship, territoriality, conflict transformation and democratic governance.
The central concern of the panel is therefore not simply why ethnic conflicts occur, but how ethnic boundaries come to acquire political meaning, how they shape relationships between communities, and how those relationships may change over time. By bringing together diverse cases from Northeast India, the panel aims to move beyond state-centred accounts of conflict and foreground the lived, political and relational dimensions of ethnic diversity in the region.