English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

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.

Neoliberal Capitalism and Ethno-Territoriality in Highland Northeast India: Resource-Extraction, Capitalist Desires and Ethnic Closure