Resisting Militarized and Ethnonationalist Violence

Abstract

The ongoing ethnic conflict in the Indian state of Manipur that began in May 2023 has raised the highly contentious question: Who counts as Indigenous in Manipur? Political and public discourse alike have conjured a reductive and divisive iteration of Indigeneity during the ethnic violence. It is not incidental that this resonates with the global right-wing playbook of the day in which various forms of ethnonationalism and subnationalism frame certain social groups as the “other.” This article critiques such a hegemonic articulation of Indigeneity and refuses to disavow it at the same time in this undertheorized part of Indigenous Asias. It begins with an analysis of how Indigeneity has been co-opted by an ethnoterritorial nationalist ideology during the ongoing civil conflict in Manipur against the backdrop of a decades-long political conflict. Drawing on fieldwork with women-led peacebuilding circles in Manipur, who mobilize under “Indigeneity,” the author conceptualizes a situated critical Indigenous framework, building on critical Indigenous studies, Indigenous feminisms, and feminist approaches to peace and conflict studies. By highlighting the limits of state recognition and identitarianism, this study offers an analytic of Manipur’s complex and understudied sociopolitical processes. In doing so, the article introduces nungsi grounded in Manipuri Indigenous relationality to conceptualize a transnational feminist Indigeneity centering radical love, collective care, and political solidarity underpinning such peacebuilding praxes.