1. Two dates, one problem

In 2009, Bolivia remade itself as a plurinational state, on the authority of a constituent assembly in which Indigenous Peoples took part as principals and not as petitioners. Since then, eight Indigenous autonomies have been constituted. They exercise no authority over the subsoil beneath their territories and are financed on substantially the same terms as any municipality.

In 2015, the Government of India and Naga negotiators signed a Framework Agreement recording that in a democracy sovereignty lies with the people. Eleven years on, the Naga people have not been asked to exercise it.

Both of these problems arise from the same constitutional question. The issue is where that authority originates and whether it can be called upon again. The plurinational constitutions recognise many peoples as subjects of the order and one people as its author. The Naga difficulty is the reverse — an authority never conferred, and so never closed, but with no settled constitutional mechanism through which the people can exercise it. Neither arrangement secures both dimensions.

2. Terms, comparison and scope

Sovereignty is the quality of ultimate political authority, which in a democracy resides in the people and is not transferable, though its exercise may be entrusted. Self-determination is a right of peoples, with an internal dimension concerning how a people governs itself within an existing state and an external dimension concerning international status. Autonomy denotes a sphere of authority recognised by a state; self-government denotes the standing capacity of a people to constitute and direct the institutions through which it governs; self-governance denotes the continuing practice of governing through those institutions, norms and relationships.  

Bolivia and Ecuador underwent constituent processes aimed at refounding the state. The Naga case is a long bilateral negotiation between a state and a political movement. These are not the same kind of process but what is compared is a relation, namely the relation between the source of a people’s authority and the material and institutional base on which that authority can be exercised. The relation appears in both settings, despite their very different political and institutional conditions.

The Nagas are a territorial majority in their homeland, while Indigenous Peoples hold varying demographic positions in Bolivia and Ecuador. These Andean nations are rentier
states, whereas the Indian state in the Northeast operates primarily as a security state.

The Nagas constitute a territorial majority in their homeland, whereas Indigenous Peoples occupy different demographic positions in the two Andean states.

The Nagas constitute a territorial majority in their homeland, whereas Indigenous Peoples occupy different demographic positions in the two Andean states. Bolivia and Ecuador are rentier states whose legitimacy rests on redistributing resource revenue; the Indian state in the Northeast has operated substantially as a security state through exceptional legislation, which produces different incentives and different instruments of control. The relationship between Indigenous movements and political parties differs in each. These are the limits of the comparison. If the same relationship appears in such different settings, it is more likely to reflect a structural pattern than a feature of one political environment.

This article is written from a Naga vantage point and for a Naga purpose, which is to learn from what Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador achieved and from what they were unable to hold. The Latin American material rests on the work of scholars and movements in the region. The Latin American literature on de facto autonomy is taken up below through a single case, Chiapas, as a particularly clear instance of autonomy exercised without formal legal recognition. The internal contestation of Indigenous self-government, including the scholarship of Indigenous women, is touched on only where it bears on what peoplehood requires.

On sources, two competing versions of the text of the Framework Agreement have been published in the media but the competency proposals that followed are not in the public domain; the discussion below is therefore limited to the broad constitutional and political arrangement they indicate and does not quote the provisions directly. The claim on which the argument turns is independent of those confidential materials. It is that no constituent act appears on the public record, a claim that would be displaced by the production of such an act.

3. Bolivia: an architecture built, then narrowed

Bolivia gave constitutional standing to 36 nations and their languages, created a Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal and special Indigenous constituencies, recognised Indigenous jurisdiction as equal to the ordinary courts, and recognised Indigenous autonomy as arising from the pre-existing authority of Indigenous nations rather than as a grant from the centre. This was won over decades, at a cost that included lives.

The boundary between what the constitution recognised and what remained with the state is consistent throughout.Identity, language, custom and jurisdiction were recognised; the subsoil, the resource rent and much of the fiscal power stayed with the state. Bolivian Indigenous autonomies hold certain taxation powers attached to municipal competencies, but the available tax base is negligible and dependence on central transfers remains very high. A distinction that is often overlooked also matters. Indigenous territories hold considerably stronger rights over renewable natural resources than over the non-renewable subsoil, which remains with the state.

Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law. What a constitution grants, an ordinary statute can substantially narrow without amendment.

Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law.

Two mechanisms then narrowed what recognition delivered. The first is at the point of entry. A territory or municipality seeking Indigenous autonomy had to draft a written statute, win a local referendum and pass constitutional review; Ley 1198 of 2019 later eased that route, allowing a statute to be approved in a recognised Indigenous territory through the people’s own norms and procedures, with legislative approval to follow. Conversion nonetheless remained slow, which locates the constraint in the organisational capacity needed to complete the process, not in procedure alone.

The second mechanism works after recognition has been won. The Jurisdictional Demarcation Law, passed the year after the constitution, drew the boundary of that formally equal jurisdiction narrowly, placing serious criminal matters outside it along with mining, hydrocarbons and other fields. Equality therefore survives as a constitutional principle while the scope of the jurisdiction is narrowed by ordinary law. What a constitution grants, an ordinary statute can substantially narrow without amendment. This is the process of hollowing out. The breaking points have been where recognition meets the material base — the road driven through the Isiboro Sécure territory in 2011 being the clearest instance. Where a state lives on resource rent, the redistribution that sustains its legitimacy is financed by extraction from the territories where self-government would have real force.

4. Ecuador: an architecture declared, and not built

The 2008 constitution of Ecuador established plurinationality and interculturality as principles of the state and recognised Indigenous jurisdiction and Indigenous territorial districts, but it did not produce an equivalent institutional architecture for Indigenous autonomy, and no Indigenous territorial district has been constituted. Where Bolivia built and narrowed, Ecuador declared and did not build.

The narrowing that did occur came through adjudication. In 2014, in La Cocha, the Constitutional Court held that Indigenous jurisdiction does not extend to cases involving death, narrowing by interpretation the jurisdiction that the constitution had recognised in principle. Then, a national referendum in 2023 mandated an end to drilling in Yasuní, but the result has not been fully implemented. By 2026, a major exercise of Indigenous political mobilisation had become defensive. Indigenous organisations helped defeat a referendum on a new constituent assembly, while Indigenous and environmental organisations faced restrictions on their civic activity, including the freezing of bank accounts.

5. What the two retreats share

Hollowing out by statute in one state, non-implementation and judicial restriction in the other — different routes producing a similar structural weakness. This points to something in the structure of conferred recognition rather than to the politics of one governing party. Three features are common. The material base stayed with the state in each. The difficulty of the route to autonomy was in each case read back into the people as evidence of incapacity. And because the plurinational project was constituted through constitutional law, its survival depends in significant part on courts and legislatures continuing to uphold it. Where judicial independence erodes or political institutions turn hostile, its constitutional protections become vulnerable. By 2026 the strain is visible in both, with Bolivia’s long protest wave taking place inside the constitutional order rather than directed towards a new one. What was not secured was a continuing institutional capacity for the peoples themselves to reopen the constitutional settlement. The constituent power that could author the order was exercised at the founding but not reserved to be exercised again.

6. A people that has not been asked

6.1. A regime nobody granted

The Naga homeland lies across what is now northeast India and northwest Myanmar. Before colonial rule, there was no centralised Naga state because political authority was organised at the village level. Each village was its own polity, governing through its own institutions, holding its land and settling disputes under its customary law, with authority resting on the agreement of those who lived under it. Land and its resources belonged to communities and still do. That political and territorial inheritance was not granted by a state.

British administration gradually brought Naga territories under separate colonial jurisdictions during the nineteenth century, and the transfer of power in 1947 divided the Naga homeland again between India and Burma, now Myanmar, without a settlement reached with the people who lived there. A wider Naga political consciousness grew from this experience rather than preceding it. Division imposed from outside made a common political voice a practical necessity. A plebiscite was held in 1951; armed conflict followed, then long negotiation, and a ceasefire has held since 1997.

6.2. Article 371A: a shelter, not a foundation

Article 371A of the Constitution of India, in force since 1963, provides that no Act of Parliament touching Naga religious or social practice, Naga customary law and procedure, the administration of justice under that law, or the ownership and transfer of land and its resources shall apply in Nagaland unless the state legislative assembly decides that it should. Since land and its resources are understood to belong to the communities, this protects the material base more firmly than almost anything available in Latin America.

The provision must nonetheless meet the same test applied to conferred authority elsewhere, and it does not pass it. Article 371A is part of the Indian constitutional order and operates through a state legislative assembly. What is distinctive in the Naga situation is not the provision but the customary regime of community ownership that the provision recognises — a regime that predates the Indian constitutional order and is not derived from it. Article 371A is therefore the state’s recognition of an existing Naga institution, not the source of that institution.

The consequences follow from that distinction. The protection is conditional because the constitutional exclusion operates through the decision of the state legislative assembly. It is a shelter rather than a foundation. And because the Naga political question has never been settled, there has been no constituent act through which the Naga people authorised a permanent transfer or surrender of that authority. A settlement of wider scope, negotiated without constituent authority, could concede what the people never empowered their negotiators to concede. That makes protection of the material base, rather than its creation, one of the first questions any constituent settlement would have to address.

6.3. The Framework Agreement and the question of source

The Framework Agreement of 3 August 2015 recognises the unique history and position of the Nagas; records that both parties are cognizant of the universal principle that in a democracy sovereignty lies with the people; and speaks of sharing the sovereign powers as defined in the competencies.

Its meaning is contested. The Government of India has not publicly characterised the arrangement as shared sovereignty in the same terms as the NSCN (IM) but has indicated it as an enhanced form of autonomy. The leadership of the NSCN (IM) reads the same text as recognising Naga sovereignty and a relationship of shared sovereignty between distinct entities. The question pursued here is prior to both readings and has not been joined by any of the parties.

A proposed settlement intended to establish a new political order, but which cannot be shown to the people whose constituent power it claims to exercise, is not an exercise of that power, whatever its content.

A proposed settlement that cannot be shown to the people is not an exercise of their power.

The detailed competencies since proposed take the Framework Agreement as their point of departure and proceed directly to subjects of governmental and administrative power and would have the agreement itself stand as a constitution. Competencies are therefore being prepared without any exercise of constituent authority. Where the source of the competencies is unnamed, they remain open to being read as flowing from the Constitution of India, at which point the sharing of sovereign powers between two peoples could become an arrangement of autonomy within an existing constitutional order rather than a new constitutional relationship between distinct constituent peoples.

The confidentiality of the documents bears on the same point. A proposed settlement intended to establish a new political order, but which cannot be shown to the people whose constituent power it claims to exercise, is not an exercise of that power, whatever its content. Constituent authority is not a quality a document can hold privately.

6.4. What counts as a constituent act

A claim that constituent authority has not been exercised requires a criterion made up of three elements, applied to the whole record rather than to the current negotiation alone. A constituent act is one in which a people deliberates, decides by its own procedures, and authorises the creation or fundamental reordering of its political institutions.

The memorandum submitted to the Simon Commission in 1929 was a petition, not a decision. The plebiscite of 1951 satisfies the first two elements in relation to political status but not the third, since it established no institutions and conferred no mandate to design them. The Sixteen-Point Agreement of 1960 was concluded by a body with no mandate to represent or negotiate, at a point when the Naga resistance movement had been largely suppressed and the organisation claiming a mandate from the plebiscite was in no position to contest it. The Shillong Accord of 1975 was repudiated on the ground that it had not authorised the terms agreed. The competencies now under discussion rest on mandated negotiators.

Across almost a century, the Naga political process has repeatedly produced instruments that did not clearly rest on the consent of the constituent power, which is a substantial part of why none has settled the question. In the current negotiation for settlement, that power has never been expressly invoked through a constituent procedure, and the competencies still lack a publicly named source.

6.5. Who would vote?

If a people is to adopt its own settlement and reopen it, its identity cannot remain implicit. The Naga people and their ancestral territory are substantially identifiable, and identifiability is not what the Government of India disputes. The difficulty is that this homeland no longer coincides with present administrative boundaries, and Naga communities are now situated across Nagaland, Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and, across the international boundary, Myanmar. The questions include: Who participates in the settlement, which Naga ancestral areas fall within its scope, and what constitutional form can give effect to a people whose homeland has been divided among existing states? The territorial question therefore belongs within the constituent process rather than being left as a matter to be resolved afterwards. The Myanmar side raises a separate interstate question and cannot be carried into a constitutional settlement confined to India.

In comparison, a plurinational constitution can reserve constituent authority to an electorate whose legal boundaries are already drawn, even where that electorate contains several recognised peoples. The Naga constituent community is identifiable, but its political territory and the present representation of its members do not coincide. The problem lies in the absence of a constitutional form through which an existing peoplehood, whose homeland and political representation have been divided among state boundaries, can act collectively. The definition of the constituent subject is therefore inseparable from the reservation of constituent authority to that subject.

6.6. What an unresolved question costs

The Naga position is not a solution to the problem identified above; it is a different way of remaining outside a settled constitutional order. There is no settled territorial jurisdiction, and talks have been stalled for years over a flag and a constitution. A negotiation running for decades can become a form of government in itself. Authority accumulates in the bodies conducting it, prolonged representation displaces participation, and rival bodies each claim to carry an authority whose source remains uncertain.

A political community that has spent 70 years without a settled constitutional relationship has also had no occasion to build the deliberative and administrative practice that exercising one would require. This creates a problem that is structurally comparable to the difficulty seen in Bolivia, but the causes are different. In Bolivia, institutional capacity was tested by a state-defined procedure for obtaining autonomy. In the Naga case, the absence of a settled constitutional relationship has limited the opportunity to develop institutions through which the people could exercise their constituent authority.

7. What a material base must include

7.1. Title and control

A material base of self-government cannot be reduced to legal title, subsoil ownership or resource revenue. Zapatista self-government in Chiapas has operated for decades without state recognition and without any conventional transfer of fiscal resources. Its experience shows that self-government can persist where formal title and state-derived revenue are absent, provided that communities retain effective control over territory and develop the organisational capacity to exercise that control.

This makes effective control a necessary part of the material base. What sustains self-government day to day is not legal title or resource revenue as such, but effective control over territory together with accumulated organisational capacity. On that reading, Chiapas is not an exception to the argument but an important illustration of it. The Zapatistas have exercised substantial control and built organisational capacity in the absence of formal title and resource rents.

The distinction is therefore between the legal and the practical dimensions of authority. Effective control is what makes a right usable; recognised rights are what make control legally defensible. Neither substitutes for the other in a settled relationship with a state. A durable settlement of self-government therefore requires both recognised authority and the effective capacity to exercise it.

7.2. Scale as a condition of control

Latin American scholarship has long argued that self-government needs a territorial and political scale able to sustain an economic base, and that autonomy confined to fragmented municipal units becomes municipal administration under another name. Bolivian Indigenous autonomy was encapsulated within municipalities before it was further constrained by the state’s retention of subsoil resources, and the two limitations compound one another. A unit too small to sustain an economy cannot exercise resource rights effectively even where it formally holds them. Scale is therefore a condition of effective control.

The claim for integration arises in part because the present arrangement distributes Naga areas across administrative units, few of which are viable as the territorial basis of self-government. If integration were achieved, it would also avoid the problem of winning a majority among neighbours who want no part of the arrangement, a difficulty seen in some Bolivian cases. It carries an obligation in return. Where proposed Naga territories overlap with territories inhabited by other peoples, integration would place those peoples in the position of a minority within an autonomy constituted primarily by the Naga people. The terms on which those neighbours are included would therefore have to be settled with them, rather than assumed as part of the Naga claim. Subsurface deposits straddle these boundaries and the homeland crosses an international border, so shared resources would need a regime agreed with neighbours and the State.

7.3. Ownership without the means of exercise

The Naga evidence states the proposition in reverse. Recognised community ownership has not settled who may licence extraction. Oil was produced at Changpang from 1981 until May 1994, when the operator withdrew amid demands for payment for Naga resources, leaving wells improperly decommissioned; the constitutional question remains open, with Nagaland invoking Article 371A and the Union invoking the Union List together with the Mines and Minerals (Regulation and Development) Act 1957. More than 60 years after Article 371A came into force, recognised ownership has still not produced effective control over the resource.

Ownership recognised without the institutions through which it can be exercised — including a clear linkage between customary and statutory jurisdiction, budgetary authority at the community level, and the technical and legal capacity to negotiate rather than merely refuse — leaves the right formally intact but practically exposed. Where those institutions do not exist, the state retains much of the practical machinery through which resource decisions are made. Building an effective system of community resource governance would therefore require authority and institutional capacity to exercise ownership.

An independent material base does not democratise-government by itself. Revenue accruing to an autonomous authority can concentrate power within a territory just as readily as it can remain under external control.

8. The condition no settlement supplies for itself

The constitutional settlement cannot supply for itself the political capacity needed to sustain it. The constitutional texts of Bolivia and Ecuador did not change between 2009 and 2026; the executives did, and recognition proved vulnerable once the institutions responsible for implementing it turned against it. More broadly, Indigenous self-government is difficult to sustain where the surrounding state ceases to respect democratic institutions and recasts claims to self-government as threats to territorial unity.Across Asia, claims to self-governance have often been treated as separatism and answered with force.

There is a trap in the observation. If self-government must await the state’s democratisation, the state holds a veto over it. Two considerations close the trap. Indigenous self-government is itself democratising. Plurinationality is, at its core, a claim about the character of democracy — that a political order can contain more than one legitimate source of authority and still hold together. Coexistence therefore requires more than the restraint of the state. It requires a shared political and moral horizon between peoples, built through their relationship rather than granted by one to the other.

A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force. Peoplehood is therefore a precondition rather than a sentiment.

A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force.

Self-determination is in this sense a practice carried on over time rather than a fixed institutional arrangement. A shared horizon is required between peoples, so that coexistence rests on something other than the balance of force. Peoplehood is therefore a precondition rather than a sentiment. Coherence sufficient to act together means the capacity to act through disagreement, not its absence, and a conception of peoplehood that treats dissent as a threat to unity produces a silenced subject rather than a constituent one, and the experience of Indigenous women in particular shows that rights are claimed within autonomy rather than against it.

The Bolivian record is telling here. The composite category through which Indigenous peoplehood entered the constitutional text held as long as the coalition behind it held, then broke along the division it had covered, between Andean peasant federations and lowland territorial organisations. By the time the order needed its authors again, they no longer existed in a form able to act. That closure was contingent and political rather than inherent in constitution-making, which places the remedy less in drafting than in the maintenance of political power.

Proposal

Since the diagnosis is that constitutional texts are insufficient without the power and capacity to sustain them, the proposals address who holds and can exercise something — authority, territory, revenue or institutional capacity — rather than what a document merely says about it. Reserved constituent power.

Sovereignty is inherent in the people and cannot be permanently transferred, even though its exercise may be entrusted to institutions.A constitution must therefore specify when and in what circumstances the founding power may be reconvened and must leave that power with the people rather than with the head of state, the institutions or the negotiators. Where the text draws no such boundary, whoever holds office will draw it.

A standard objection in constitutional theory is that once a constitution regulates how a  constituent power is exercised, what it regulates is no longer constituent power but a constituted power of amendment.No constitution creates constituent power, and none can abolish it; a reopening clause acknowledges a power the text cannot originate and specifies who may set it in motion. The alternative to specifying it is not preservation but silence, which leaves the question to whoever holds office when it arises. The objection also points to a useful distinction. If a regulated reopening procedure is merely an amendment power, then the Bolivian and Ecuadorian provisions should not be described as reservations of constituent power to Indigenous peoples. What is proposed here is narrower in scope than general constituent power but distinct from ordinary amendment, reaching only the terms of the relationship between a people and the state.

A power invocable at will would make government impossible; one never invocable is not reserved. Four specifications give it workable shape:

• Who may trigger it. The people whose authority is at stake, acting through their own institutions and procedures, and not only the national electorate. In a plurinational order each constituent people holds the trigger for the terms constituting its own relationship with the state.
• What it reaches. Not the constitution at large but the terms of the relationship; the distribution of authority between the people and the state, the territorial arrangement, the material base, and the reopening procedure itself. Ordinary legislation and ordinary amendment remain with the constituted powers.
• Under what circumstances. Material breach, where the state has failed to implement or has legislated to narrow what was agreed; fundamental change of circumstances, such as a major resource discovery or a fundamental change in the constitutional character of the state; and periodic review at intervals of a generation. Periodic review matters most in practice, because it makes reconsideration a normal constitutional possibility rather than an allegation of bad faith.
• By what procedure. Deliberation within the people according to its own norms, decision by the people concerned, negotiation with the state, ratification by both. Initiation would not be unilateral, but neither would it require the other party’s permission.

Any such clause should state expressly that it is not a right of secession and should be drafted so that it cannot be read as one. Its purpose is the renegotiation of terms within a continuing relationship.

Both plurinational constitutions do provide for reconvening the founding power. In Bolivia, total reform, or reform touching the fundamental bases, rights and guarantees, proceeds through a plenipotentiary constituent assembly activated by referendum, which may be set in motion by citizen initiative carrying at least twenty per cent of the electorate, by an absolute majority of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, or by the President, the resulting text requiring approval at a constitutional referendum. In Ecuador, a constituent assembly may be convoked only through popular consultation, requested by the President, by two-thirds of the National Assembly, or by twelve per cent of those on the electoral register, with any new constitution approved by referendum.

The trigger and the ratification mechanisms are organised through the national electorate as a single constitutional body. Neither constitution reserves the initiative to a constituent people as such. A plurinational constitution reserving the founding power only to the national body of voters has not institutionalised plurinationality in this respect. It recognises many peoples as subjects of the order and one people as its author. The criticism is internal to the plurinational project rather than directed against it. The question is whether recognising several peoples should extend beyond recognising them as subjects of rights and autonomy to reserving to each a constituent authority over the fundamental terms of its own relationship with the state.

9. What international law supports

India has not ratified ILO Convention No. 169; Bolivia ratified it in 1991 and Ecuador in 1998. Its consultation and benefit-sharing requirements therefore bind Bolivia and Ecuador as parties to the Convention, but not India. The relevant provision is in any event conditional in form, addressing cases in which the State retains ownership of mineral or sub-surface resources, and so presupposes rather than confers that ownership, which arises under domestic law.

UNDRIP recognises, in Article 26, the right to own, use, develop and control lands, territories and resources without expressly excluding sub-surface resources; requires, in Article 32(2), free, prior and informed consent before approval of projects affecting those territories, naming mineral resources expressly; and provides redress where resources have been taken without consent. The argument here draws on this stronger conception of control and consent rather than treating consultation as the outer limit of Indigenous participation.

One foreseeable objection concerns territorial integrity. The Declaration carries a savings clause for the territorial integrity and political unity of sovereign and independent states. That clause does not itself establish an unconditional rule that existing territorial arrangements prevail over all claims of self-determination. The closely related 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle in a formulation that refers to states conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination and possessing a government representing the whole people without distinction. Territorial integrity appears there as a condition to be met, not a guarantee.

The Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle in a formulation referring to States conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination and possessing a government representing the whole people.

The Friendly Relations Declaration states the territorial-integrity principle, referring to States in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination.

A second foreseeable objection concerns India’s position on self-determination. India has entered a declaration concerning Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that limits the right of self-determination, for purposes of India’s undertaking under the Covenant, to peoples under foreign domination. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Pakistan objected to that declaration. The declaration records India’s position in the treaty framework; it does not by itself determine what India and the Nagas may agree in a negotiated settlement. No such settlement has yet been concluded.

10. What self-government is, and what a settlement must secure

Self-government is the standing capacity of a people to establish, direct and remake the institutions through which it governs itself, resting on five conditions together  —  a people coherent enough to act together, in the sense given above; authority originating in the people rather than in a grant; a material base consisting of effective control over territory and its resources, at a scale able to sustain them, together with revenue held as of right; institutions answerable to the people and capable of being remade; and the practical capacity to design those institutions and govern through them.

Stated as requirements, and drawn from what the two experiences show, this is what a settlement would need to secure:

1. Name the origin of the authority it recognises, and recognise rather than create it;
2. Be adopted by the people themselves through a constituent assembly, referendum, plebiscite or comparable process, and not by negotiators alone;
3. Set out when and how the people may reconvene to revise it, with a trigger available to the people concerned and not only to a wider electorate;
4. Secure land, subsoil and resources as of right, at a viable scale, together with authority over their alienation and transfer, and the institutions and revenue through which that holding can be exercised;
5. Reduce nothing already protected, a settlement being measured against the position it replaces;
6. Entrench competencies so that they cannot be narrowed by statute or emptied by interpretation, with disputes referred to an independent forum rather than to the administration of one party;
7. Draw the form of government from the people’s own traditions rather than an external template;
8. Answer to its own members, standards such as the equal standing of women being reached through the people’s own institutions, supported by education and resources, rather than by external mandate alone;
9. Establish a standing forum in which the parties meet as parties, and a corresponding forum with neighbouring peoples or jurisdictions where territory or resources are shared;
10. Treat the capacity to design a governing architecture, and to govern through it, as a standing programme of work rather than as something acquired after signature.

The first nine are matters to be secured through mutual agreement and reciprocal obligation; the tenth is a capacity that no settlement can confer and that the people themselves must build and exercise. Capacity of this sort — administrative, fiscal, deliberative, and sufficient to carry internal disagreement — must be built by Indigenous governments and movements themselves, and there are two reasons for treating it as urgent. Where autonomy has functioned well in Latin America, organisational depth and governing practice generally preceded the legal form, with the legal framework recognising and consolidating capacities that had already developed. And states have learned to read missing capacity as a reason to withhold authority, turning a shortfall into an argument against further authority.

The pathways through which movements enter parties and state programmes, the conditions attached to participation, and the dismantling or displacement of institutions peoples had built for themselves all shape how much organisational capacity can accumulate. In the Naga case, the raw material has not been absent. Villages have governed continuously, although protracted militarisation, institutional disruption and weaknesses within the movements themselves have eroded that inheritance. What remains missing and unfinished is the deliberate work of revitalising and connecting those surviving institutions into a wider political, fiscal and administrative capacity capable of sustaining self-government at the scale required.

11. Conclusion

None of this requires an unprecedented constitutional imagination, with States building beyond the doctrinal minimum. Denmark’s Self-Government Act recognises the people of Greenland as a people under international law with the right of self-determination and establishes a defined legal route through which the relationship may develop further. The Latin American constituent processes also went a considerable distance, but stopped short when they recognised multiple peoples as subjects of the constitutional order but did not reserve to those peoples a continuing constituent authority, and substantial control over the material base remained with the state. The Naga process has kept the question open at the cost of never securing an answer and now risks settling how government will work without first settling where its authority comes from.

The question is who constitutes whom — and whether, once answered, that question may be asked again.

The post Who Constitutes Whom? Constituent Power, the Material Base, and the Limits of Plurinational Recognition: a Naga Reading of the Latin American Experience appeared first on Debates Indígenas.

Further, the 2025 End-of-Year Report from the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) recorded 135 cases of Indigenous territory dispossession, up from 121 cases the year before. The mining sector accounted for the most cases, with 69 incidents affecting 1.06 million hectares. The plantation sector caused the most widespread damage, covering 1.95 million hectares. Indigenous communities lost 3.8 million hectares of their ancestral territories that year, and authorities criminalized 162 Indigenous people for defending their living space.

There are generally three interlocking mechanisms which are driving both ecological damage and violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights: Legislation reduces ecological reality to administrative categories such as state forests and industrial zones; Development extractivism treats nature as a capital that must be exploited. The Mineral and Coal Mining Law, the Plantation Law, and the Job Creation Law form the legal basis for mining and palm oil expansion. Further, conservation and climate policy that exclude participation often repeat the same extractivist patterns. Carbon markets lock up Indigenous forests through bans on access, cultivation shifts, and firewood gathering.

These three mechanisms converge on one point: the bodies of Indigenous women, who tend and care for their lands and communities every day.

The Burden that Lands on Indigenous Women’s Bodies

Indigenous women fetch water, gather firewood, harvest medicinal plants, and tend to rotational gardens. When ecosystems break down, this work grows heavier and riskier. When rivers become polluted, women have to walk farther to find clean water. When the forests disappear, medicinal plants disappear with them, so women care for sick family members without the remedies they normally use.

Ecosystem damage also correlates with health problems. Women near coal mines in East Kalimantan have reported that dust from mine haul roads disrupts their menstrual cycles and their children’s health. Water contaminated with heavy metals causes skin infections and reproductive disorders. Environmental Impact Assessments (AMDAL) rarely capture this data as they measure water quality standards and emission limits rather than women’s domestic workload or reproductive health.

In many territories, when forests are turned into monoculture plantations, women lose their income from non-timber forest products, and their positions within the household weaken.

When forests are turned into monoculture plantations, women lose their income from non-timber forest products, and their positions within the household weaken.

Ecosystem damage also negatively interferes with the transmission of Indigenous ecological knowledge. Indigenous women have obtained knowledge about fruiting seasons, animal migration cycles, and the location of medicinal plants through direct observation over generations. In the Rejang, Serawai, and Malin Deman Indigenous territories in Bengkulu, Indigenous women identify hundreds of forest plant species as food and medicine. When the forests are cleared for plantations or mines, the younger generations lose the chance to learn this knowledge firsthand.

Lastly, Indigenous territories also serve as spaces for women’s ritual life and economic activity.  In many territories, when forests are turned into monoculture plantations, women lose their source of income from non-timber forest products, and their position within the household weaken.

The Climate Crisis Deepens the Double Burden

The biodiversity and climate crises are connected. Deforestation releases carbon stored in the forests and peatlands, which accelerates global warming. Indigenous women bear the brunt of the impacts from both crises. As forests disappear, the land loses its capacity to store water. Dry seasons grow drier, and rainy seasons bring a higher risk of flooding. Women responsible for household water must walk farther during the dry seasons on top of dealing with gardens suffering from damages, as well as contaminated water, during the rainy seasons.

Shifts in planting seasons also disrupt women’s Indigenous knowledge of ecological indicators. When seasonal patterns become unpredictable, harvests decline. In many Indigenous households, women reduce their own food portions first to ensure that their children have enough to eat. Carbon market schemes add new risks. These schemes require large forest areas, and as a direct consequence such schemes often impose access restrictions. As such, Indigenous women’s needs for shifting cultivation, resin, and firewood remain further disrespected.

Ecosystem damage also threatens keystone species that form part of Indigenous women’s knowledge systems. The Sumatran tiger, orangutan, and elephant lose their habitats as forests are converted into palm oil plantations and mines. For Indigenous women, the presence of certain species indicates forest and water quality levels. When those species disappear, women lose the tools they use daily to read and understand their environment.

Women and the Recovery of the Commons

Indigenous women do not only carry the burden. They are the keepers of seeds, they are leaders of agrarian resistance, and they build conservation practices rooted in Indigenous knowledge. The Kendeng Indigenous women, for example, printed their feet in cement in front of the State Palace to oppose a cement factory in the Kendeng Mountains, then continued their advocacy through independent monitoring of spring water quality and flow. Papuan women resisted the expansion of a large-scale food estate project in Merauke, while documenting sago-processing knowledge so it would not disappear.

In Bengkulu, Rejang women store local rice seeds between planting seasons as a living gene bank, while maintaining garden rotation that restores soil fertility. In Merpas and Linau Villages, along the south Bengkulu coastal area, women avoid destructive fishing gear and have agreed on spawning zones in the lagoon. These practices show that conservation does not require removing people from protected areas. Conservation grounded in Indigenous women’s knowledge works through active involvement rather than restricted access.

Commoning Movement builds solidarity among Indigenous women’s communities, works with legal partners, and advocates for policies that require Indigenous women’s Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

Commoning Movement builds solidarity among Indigenous women’s communities, works with legal partners such as Akar Law Office.

Akar Global Initiative developed the Rebuilding the Commons framework to strengthen women’s contributions across four dimensions. Commoning Land restores Indigenous land as a jointly managed space through participatory mapping, restoration based on local species, and collective governance that includes Indigenous women as decision-makers. Commoning Care recognizes women’s care work as ecological labour, supported by clean water infrastructure, documentation of care work, and reproductive health services in affected areas.

Commoning Culture restores ritual practice and Indigenous ecological knowledge through oral documentation and intergenerational education programs, so that younger generations receive elder women’s knowledge before it disappears. Commoning Movement builds solidarity among Indigenous women’s communities, collaborates with legal partners such as Akar Law Office, and advocates for policies that require Indigenous women’s Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) for every permit necessary for mining, plantation, and energy. These four dimensions support one another.

Challenges on the Ground

This collective action framework faces three concrete challenges. In many regions, customary structures still place men as the community’s representatives, so formal engagement of Indigenous women often meets resistance. Government and international donor conservation programs still measure success by protected area size or stored carbon volume rather than measuring the impacts on Indigenous women’s living conditions. Without a change in the aforementioned indicators, Indigenous women’s contributions remain officially unrecognized. Pressure from mining expansion and national strategic projects also keeps rising each year, so community-based recovery keeps facing new threats whose scale exceeds what Indigenous communities can respond to alone.

In turn, biodiversity and ecosystem restoration and recovery require legal change, not only technical rehabilitation programs. Environmental impact assessments need to include body-level indicators, such as the distance Indigenous women travel to find clean water and the number of medicinal plants lost from their daily access radius. Legal frameworks need to recognize Indigenous women’s ecological knowledge of seasons, seeds, and ecological indicators as equal to formal scientific studies, through a mechanism that requires Indigenous women’s Free, Prior and Informed Consent as a condition for valid permits.

Indonesia’s biodiversity and deforestation crises are not isolated technical problems. This damage lands hardest on Indigenous women, who fetch water, keep seeds, and carry out the ecological rituals.

Indonesia’s biodiversity and deforestation crises are not isolated technical problems. This damage lands hardest on Indigenous women, who fetch water, keep seeds, and carry out the ecological rituals.

Environmental law paradigms also need to shift from state sovereignty over natural resources toward shared governance, where Indigenous women act as decision-makers, not merely consultation participants. Ecological justice requires reparation, not just financial compensation. This means returning Indigenous land, water sources, ritual spaces, and lost species, paired with ecological regeneration programs led by Indigenous women.

Indonesia’s biodiversity and deforestation crises are not isolated technical problems. This damage lands hardest on Indigenous women, who fetch water, keep seeds, and carry out the ecological rituals that bind their communities to nature every day. Indonesia’s biodiversity recovery will only succeed once policy recognizes Indigenous women as primary agents of recovery, not passive beneficiaries of conservation programs designed without their involvement.

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The territorial boundaries of Taung Pat Lal are demarcated by natural geographical landmarks, including the Tho Doe The Loe creek, Chein Loe Yo (Tiger Creek), El Bra Loe Chee, Chein Loe Htit (Tiger Rock), Thaw Kha Loe Chee, and the ridges of Yae Ka Hday and Kyar Mwe mountains. Within these boundary markers, the community manages a sophisticated zoning system that seamlessly integrates food production, biodiversity conservation, and spiritual protection. Rotational agricultural lands (Shwe Pyaung Taung Ya), family-managed perennial agroforestry orchards, and communal and sacred lands such as protected watershed areas and sacred sites including the Prayer Mountain (Su Taung Taung), a Marian Grotto (Mae Taw Gu), and community cemetery grounds takes part of the community managed zoning system.

Customary land tenure is governed equitably. Inheritance of family orchards and land is granted equally between daughters and sons without gender discrimination. Land boundaries are respected through customary oral agreements and natural landmarks. To safeguard ancestral territories from external land-grabbing, customary rules prohibit selling inherited lands to outsiders from distant areas. If a family must transfer land, it must remain with relatives or community members. Dispute resolution is overseen by village elders, local leaders, and religious figures, terminating in traditional reconciliation practices, such as symbolic handshakes and collective prayers.

Indigenous Knowledge and Ecosystem Conservation

The conservation value of Indigenous lands comes directly from deep-rooted Indigenous ecological knowledge passed down across generations. In Taung Pat Lal, customary resource management contains mechanisms that regulate extraction and protect forest fauna and flora:

1. Agro-biodiversity and biological pest control

In rotational rice plots, Gheba Karen farmers practice agro-farming by planting Phor Li Phor Par (cockscomb flowers) along rice field margins. These vibrant flowers attract insects away from the rice, providing natural biological control that minimizes crop damage without the use of chemical pesticides and underpins the  importance of Indigenous customary knowledge. Furthermore, rotational plots host a diverse mix of food crops, preserving a genetic bank of resilient local plants and species.

2. Seed-keeping and leadership of Indigenous women

Women (Maetaw Thami) play a crucial role in maintaining agro-biodiversity. Following harvest, women carefully select, sun-dry, and smoke inherited seeds over kitchen households to protect them from insects, storing them safely for the next planting season. Customary rituals reinforce seed purity. When transferring harvested grain to the family granary, a handful of rice and a bouquet of flowers are tied to the main house post throughout the year, ensuring that the spirit of the crops (Saba Leik Pyar) remains tied to the land and is replanted in the spring.

3. Sustainable harvesting rules

The community enforces strict seasonal and biological guidelines for harvesting Non-Timber Forest Products. Bamboo shoots (Myit) are vital for living and livelihoods, with families harvesting bamboo shoots seasonally while maintaining root stock integrity. Medicinal plants such as Bhon Ma Ra Za roots and wild orchids are extracted selectively to prevent depletion.

4. Indigenous herbal heritage and practice

The Gheba Karen Affairs Committee and local youth documented a comprehensive collection of medicinal plants. Local Indigenous healers rely on species like Dwi Yin Kaung (a wild forest fern), which is crushed into a poultice with sesame oil, turmeric, and local binders to treat severe bone fractures and tissue injuries. Other wild forest species, such as Yae Yin Pyar leaves, wild jackfruit leaves, and ginger roots, are used for post-natal care and treating physical trauma.

Increasing Threats: Conflict, Destruction, and Climate Vulnerability

Despite these sustainable practices, Indigenous Peoples in Myanmar’s tropical forests face escalating structural threats that endanger both their rights and their ecosystems.

1. Escalating conflict and human rights violations

The operational environment in Kayin (Karen) State is defined by intense military conflict and displacement. Across Thantaunggyi Township and neighboring Leiktho, civilian populations endure frequent airstrikes, heavy artillery shelling, and village burnings by military regime resulting in thousands displaced across the Thantaunggyi / Leiktho regional corridor. Reports document severe casualties, including regime airstrikes on April 29, 2026 in Thantaunggyi that killed 20 civilians, alongside widespread destruction of homes. Thousands of residents remain internally displaced in forest zones, unable to return to burned down villages. These conditions prevent regular agricultural cycles and threaten human security. Moreover, Indigenous Gheba Karen communities are also bearing the burden of sheltering and accommodating other internally displaced people from Bago Region, further straining their resources and resilience. The ongoing violence not only devastates lives and property but also hinders long-term development and stability in the region. Urgent international attention and support are needed to address these crises, protect civilian lives, and promote sustainable peace and recovery efforts.

2. Loss of biodiversity and Indigenous knowledge

Deforestation and habitat destruction intensified by historical commercial exploitation which have caused severe decline in biodiversity, including a rising threat against rare medicinal plant species. As elder medicinal plant experts die without proper record-keeping, generations of Indigenous healthcare knowledge risk permanent extinction. Documenting these practices is critical to prevent the loss of Indigenous knowledge and ensure that future benefit-sharing mechanisms respect community ownership.

3. Climate shocks and rodent crises

Tropical forest communities are on the frontlines of climate change. In 2024, extreme monsoon rains triggered severe landslides across Taung Pat Lal, destroying upland hill rice fields, turmeric crops, and valuable customary cardamom agroforest systems. This vulnerability is intensified by cyclical ecological crises. In 1975 and 2016, mass bamboo flowering (Mautam cycles) caused rodent population explosions that destroyed upland rice fields, forcing communities into prolonged economic recovery.

4. Top-down conservation and policy exclusion

Historically, state-driven conservation frameworks and top-down initiatives have ignored customary tenure, treating Indigenous Peoples as threats to forests rather than their primary guardians. Modern market-driven conservation mechanisms such as carbon  and biodiversity credits and offsets risk replicating “fortress conservation” models if implemented without Indigenous Peoples right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), threatening to displace communities from their ancestral lands.

The Need to Align Global Biodiversity Goals with Local Realities

The evidence from Taung Pat Lal (Khlo Do) demonstrates that global biodiversity goals cannot be achieved through top-down mandates or corporate offsetting strategies. As CBD Parties negotiate the operationalization of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) at COP17 in Armenia, the experience of Myanmar’s Indigenous communities’ points to fundamental policy priorities:

1.  Implementing Safeguards and Free, Prior and Informed Consent

All conservation, climate mitigation, and offset projects must enforce Section C of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) safeguards. Protected area expansion, green infrastructure projects, or carbon and biodiversity credit schemes should only proceed after obtaining the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples over their ancestral lands and resources. Furthermore, conservation and carbon- and biodiversity credit schemes that drive dispossession of Indigenous Peoples should be eliminated.

2. Direct Recognition of Indigenous Territories

Target 3 (30×30) must not be interpreted purely as the expansion of state-managed protected areas or exclusive national parks. CBD Parties must formally recognize and legally protect Indigenous Territories as distinct, self-governed conservation designations. Systems like Taung Pat Lal’s customary fallow management and communal forest protection are effective conservation models that directly maintain tropical forest territories and biodiversity. For example, customary zoning (sacred areas, orchards, watersheds) successfully conserves intact forest canopy without state enforcement.

3. Protection of Environmental Human Rights Defenders

Ensure the full, equitable and meaningful participation of Indigenous Peoples in decision-making and uphold complete land tenure rights. Robust, direct legal protection and funding mechanisms for Indigenous environmental human rights defenders operating in conflict zones should be ensured. In conflict-affected tropical forest zones, Indigenous land stewards act as the final defense against illegal logging, extraction, and ecosystem collapse. Implementing Target 22 requires operational mechanisms to protect environmental human rights defenders operating in high-risk conflict environments, and shield local guardians facing violent conflict, airstrikes, and land grabbing.

4. Direct Climate and Biodiversity Financing

Despite safeguarding crucial carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots, Indigenous Peoples organizations face systemic barriers to direct funding. International financial mechanisms must establish direct, accessible funding streams for grassroots Indigenous Peoples organizations, bypassing centralized state channels to support community-led mapping, traditional knowledge preservation, and climate resilience interventions.

Resilient Stewardship in the Tropical Forests

Myanmar’s tropical forests endure because of the Indigenous Peoples who steward and safeguard them. The customary land governance, agro-biodiversity practices, and Indigenous herbal heritage and practice of Gheba Karen community in Taung Pat Lal (Khlo Do) offer convincing proof that biodiversity conservation and human rights are fundamentally linked. As international leaders gather at COP17 in Armenia to evaluate progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), international policy must be grounded in these local realities. Fully realizing the goals of the KMGBF demands formal recognition of Indigenous territories, legal protection for customary tenure, investment in Indigenous-led monitoring, and robust safeguards for Indigenous frontline environmental defenders.

Due to the sensitive nature of the issues addressed in this article, Indigenous Debates prefers to keep the author or authors anonymous.

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The report ignores the collective aspect of justice, thus preventing changes that could ensure access to justice for Indigenous Women. The report also says nothing about the six essential interrelated components of access to justice: justiciability, availability, accessibility, good quality, provision of remedies for victims, and accountability of justice systems. In addition to being listed in Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) General Recommendation. No. 39, these components are also applicable in the case of Indigenous Women and girls.

One of the fundamental root causes of the injustice suffered by Indigenous Women in Nepal is the lack of recognition of their legal personality, disregarding the distinct identity and their principal role as custodians of the Indigenous collective identity, culture, heritage (tangible and intangible), language, knowledge, civilization, biodiversity, and lands, territories and resources. Women make up 50.4% of the population of Nepal, of which 37.5% are Adivasi Janajati Women. According to the 2021 population census, the Indigenous population comprises 35.2%, and Indigenous Women account for approximately 18%, of the total national population.

Pillars of Sovereignty and Guardians of Nature

Unlike Indigenous Women, the Constitution of Nepal recognizes Dalit women (members of the lowest caste groups in the traditional caste hierarchy) with equal access to privileges such as participation in all State bodies, based on the principle of proportional inclusion; special measures for employment, representation, and participation; resource provision for the traditional occupations, knowledge, skills, and technology of the Dalit community; and land provision for landless Dalit, etc. The right to social justice is not, however, guaranteed to Indigenous Women as they are not recognized in the constitution in the same way as Dalit women are.

Access to justice in the context of Indigenous Peoples is closely linked to the collective exercise of sovereignty over lands, territories, and natural resources. Indigenous Women are pillars of sovereignty and custodians of nature, a cornerstone of Indigenous jurisprudence. Moreover, Indigenous Women hold pivotal decision-making roles in households, communities, and cultural affairs, which are under critical challenge from colonial laws and practices.

In the customary system of the Magar Indigenous people, natural features are given female names, such as Khagar or Kuthi (the Himalayas), Boki (the hills), Kaanta (the foothills) and so on with forests, trees, waters and streams.

In the customary system of the Magar Indigenous people, natural features are given female names, such as Khagar or Kuthi (the Himalayas), Boki (the hills) and Kaanta (the foothills).

One example of this is the religious belief of the Yakthung (Limbu) Indigenous people, which is closely linked to nature. In their belief system of Mundhum, “Tambhungma” is a forest deity, and the forest belongs to her (and not to human beings). Tambhungma represents the supreme power of women to maintain the physical, mental, and spiritual life of humans in balance with nature. When someone falls sick, Tambhungma must be worshipped, and permission must be obtained before taking and using the forest’s products. The daytime is designated for human beings and the night for Tambhungma; human activities are therefore strictly prohibited in the forest at night.

In the customary system of the Magar Indigenous people, natural features are given female names, such as Khagar or Kuthi (the Himalayas), Boki (the hills), Kaanta (the foothills) and so on with forests, trees, waters and streams. In the Magar customary system, which is still practised in Atharah Magarat (the 18 regions or kingdoms of the Magyar people), known as Kachahari, women participate equally in land and resource management, including decision-making.

Towards a Paradigm Shift in Law

Another example of how Indigenous Women’s belonging and cultural identity are reflected differently from the mainstream society can be seen in names. A woman’s surname in Hindu castes (the majority religion in Nepal) changes after marriage whereas in Indigenous customary practice the woman retains her communal identity (both her community belonging and her collective rights). The state laws, however, fail to recognize these aspects of Indigenous Women’s identity, belonging, and role in spiritual practices. Respect for all women, irrespective of their origins, caste, ethnicity, creed, linguistic groups, communities, or denomination, thus requires a paradigm shift in law.

The constitution does not explicitly define what access to justice is and nor does it clarify the six essential interrelated components of access to justice, although it does recognize the right to justice as a fundamental right. The constitution lists criminal justice-related elements but omits the right to a fair trial by an independent, impartial and competent court or judicial body, to which every person is entitled. It also gives the power of exercising justice to the courts and other judicial bodies, in accordance with the constitution, other laws, and recognized principles of justice.

Constitutionally, the courts and other judicial bodies are responsible for delivering justice. The constitution does not, however, recognize the customary justice system, widely practised in Indigenous communities (which have almost no access to formal judicial mechanisms). The constitution not only closes the door on Indigenous jurisprudence but it also denies the Indigenous justice system, which guarantees access to justice in the community. This creates a structural barrier for Indigenous Women in accessing justice, since most Indigenous Women live in rural areas, while the courts are located in the city.

While procedural fairness is therefore an integral part of access to justice, Indigenous Women are, in practice, excluded from the system.

Structural Barriers: Language, Fees, and the Judicial System

Indigenous Women are the victims of inhumane treatment, violence, trafficking and exploitative systems such as Kamlari (bonded labour among Tharu women). Data reveals that Indigenous Women and girls are trafficked at an alarming rate: they make up 70% of the trafficking victims rescued by non-governmental organizations. The Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act, 2007, fails to criminalize all forms of trafficking or establish standardized victim identification protocols. According to the annual report of the Auditor General’s Office (2019-2020), only 19.4% of cases are ever resolved: 10.4% result in a conviction and 8.9% in an acquittal. The court proceedings are extremely slow, and it is hard to obtain justice in trafficking cases.

Alongside this, the court proceedings are not culturally appropriate for Indigenous Women: the official language is Khas Nepali (which is not the mother tongue of Indigenous Women), while court and lawyer fees are prohibitive. On top of this, the courts, in which the dominant caste groups are overrepresented, are largely patriarchal and shaped by the jurisprudence of the Hindu caste system, shaped by institutionalized colonization and racism.

Indigenous Peoples, and women in particular, are thus disproportionately victimized. There are currently 19 presiding judges in the Supreme Court, of which 17 are from the Khas Arya group and only two are Indigenous. In addition, these two Indigenous judges are from the Newar Indigenous people, which is just one of 60 officially-recognized Indigenous Peoples. This structure of representation, along with the influence of the caste system, limits its capacity to ensure access to justice for all.

Towards a Paradigm Shift in Law

The provision of social justice as a fundamental right in the constitution provides for the right to participate in State bodies on an inclusive basis. This applies to 16 categories of people who are economically, socially, and educationally disadvantaged, including Indigenous Peoples and Khas Arya (the dominant caste group). A reservation (quota system) is similarly institutionalized in the constitution to support social justice. There is, however, no guarantee that Indigenous Women are entitled to benefit from these provisions.

In conclusion, hurdles exist in Indigenous Women’s access to justice and are institutionalized in the constitution and laws, which systematically fail to recognize these people’s distinct collective identity/existence. The justice system in Nepal thus colonizes, assimilates, and subjugates them, compelling them to remain in a subordinate position. The constitution and laws relating to access to justice likewise do not recognize Indigenous jurisprudence, Indigenous feminist jurisprudence, their justice systems, or the role of Indigenous Women as custodians of lands and territories.

These are all cornerstones of exercising the rights to self-determination, sovereignty, and freedom from all kinds of discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, and structural violence. Recognition of self-determination and non-discrimination, along with the collective identity of Indigenous Women, their role as custodians of nature, Indigenous jurisprudence and justice administration forms the bedrock of access to justice for Indigenous Women.

The Indigenous Women of Nepal meanwhile live in hope that these rights will one day be fully recognized.

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Under these conditions, Indigenous women face heightened risks of gender-based violence, such as harassment, sexual violence and intimidation. However, survivors often face difficulties in accessing justice. They encounter discrimination, language barriers, limited legal support and a lack of information about their rights. As a result, many perpetrators are never held accountable, and Indigenous women are left without the support or remedies they need.

Violence against women in Asia

A tragic example occurred in 2025 in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. An Indigenous schoolgirl was gang raped while returning home from her classes in the Guimara area. When communities protested to demand justice, three Indigenous youths were shot and killed by the army, and four others were injured. After the shooting, Indigenous-owned shops were looted and burned, and nearby homes were damaged. This incident shows the serious risks communities face even when they demand justice peacefully. Violence discourages survivors, and intimidation discourages their communities from demanding accountability.

In my own community in Okinawa, Japan, we live with the burden of a strong United States military presence. Over the years, many women, from young children to elderly women, have experienced sexual violence linked to military personnel. Some victims have even been murdered after being assaulted. Many rape cases are not prosecuted, and some victims withdraw their complaints because seeking justice can be extremely difficult.

In other countries in the region, armed conflicts in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand also expose Indigenous women to high levels of domestic violence, rape and human trafficking. These risks are worsened by poverty and limited access to education. Another example comes from land struggles in Indonesia: Indigenous Batak women have faced harassment and violence while resisting land grabbing by a pulp and paper company operating on their ancestral territory.

The role governments must play

To address these challenges, governments must strengthen legal and institutional systems that protect the rights of Indigenous women. Justice systems must be accessible and culturally appropriate for communities. Recognizing multiple legal systems, including Indigenous justice mechanisms, can help ensure that Indigenous women are able to seek justice through processes that respect their cultures, while upholding national and international human rights standards.

Governments must also support and empower Indigenous women’s organizations so they can participate in legal processes and advocate for their communities. Preventing gender-based violence must be a priority. Governments need to enforce stronger laws and policies to protect Indigenous women and girls, especially in areas affected by militarization and resource extraction. Survivors must have access to safe spaces, healthcare, mental health services and legal assistance so they can report violence safely and pursue justice.

Accountability is also essential. Governments, corporations and other actors operating in Indigenous territories must be held responsible for human rights violations. Indigenous women who defend their lands and communities often face threats, harassment and violence. Authorities must adopt a zero-tolerance approach to attacks against Indigenous women human rights defenders. Violations must be investigated, perpetrators prosecuted and victims provided with fair and culturally appropriate reparations.

Notes to improve access to justice

In addition to justice, Indigenous women must have access to meaningful reparations. These should address both economic and social harms, including compensation for lost livelihoods, support for healthcare and education and, where possible, the restitution of lands and resources. Supporting Indigenous women’s organizations and community initiatives is also essential, because Indigenous women play a central role in protecting their communities, cultures and environments.

It is necessary to understand that achieving justice requires addressing the root causes of violence and marginalization. Governments must recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands, territories and natural resources, and ensure that development projects respect the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent.

Finally, governments must understand that Indigenous women must also be included in decision-making at all levels, from local governance to national policy discussions. Their leadership and knowledge are essential to create policies that truly reflect the needs and experiences of Indigenous communities.

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The CHT Accord of 1997, a peace treaty signed between the Indigenous movement that had led the resistance since 1974 and the ruling government party, included provisions to resolve land conflicts between Indigenous Peoples and settlers and to demilitarize the CHT by removing over 230 temporary army camps, among others. Had the CHT Accord been fully implemented by successive governments, the military occupation and settler expansion could have been halted. However, the lack of political will of successive governments to implement the Accord has resulted in a continuation of de facto military rule in CHT.

There is a symbiotic relationship between military occupation and settler expansion. Settlers rely on military protection to claim, retain and expand land ownership, while the military, with the aim of consolidating and retaining its power in CHT, depends on settlers who act as the civilian props for the military and, at times, as instruments against Indigenous resistance. In this context, when sexual violence against Indigenous women or girls is perpetrated by Bengalis, the military –in conjunction with the State institutions and other state agencies– systematically tries to protect the perpetrators.

A Repeating Pattern: the Lack of Police Cooperation

The steps for covering up crimes of sexual violence follow a recurring pattern, especially for cases that spark public outrage. And cases that gain a greater degree of national and international visibility are often the least likely to result in justice for the victims. Paradoxically, the more attention these cases receive, the more intensive the efforts of the State agencies to shield the perpetrators. In a few extreme cases, such efforts culminate in communal attacks on Indigenous Peoples by the settler Bengalis, resulting in deaths and destruction. Drawing upon four notorious sexual violence cases from the past decade, the subsequent analysis illustrates the processes by which justice is denied to the Indigenous victims.

Firstly, when family members of victims attempt to file complaints of sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by settlers, the officers in charge almost invariably show reluctance to receive them. After much persuasion and persistence, when police eventually agree to receive or file a case, critical information (such as eyewitness accounts or specific details that are crucial for future investigation) is often omitted or misrepresented. This is done intentionally to leave space for doubt and to enable the fabrication of an alternate narrative that will ultimately shield the perpetrators from accountability.

When two Marma sisters went to seek medical care at the district hospital for injuries they sustained after being allegedly raped by two soldiers, the law enforcement agencies unlawfully arrested.

When two Marma sisters went to seek medical care for injuries they sustained after being allegedly raped by two soldiers, the law enforcement agencies unlawfully arrested.

In September 2025, a 12-year-old Indigenous Marma schoolgirl stated that she had been raped by three settler Bengalis. According to her father, when he went to file a complaint, the police pressured him to describe perpetrators as “three unidentified men”, despite having eyewitness accounts of three Bengalis following her before the incident. Following the rape and murder of a Chakma woman in February 2014, her husband provided the names of three suspects based on eyewitness accounts. The police deliberately omitted those names when drafting the case and, without informing the changes to the husband (who was illiterate), police obtained his signature on the document the next day.  

In May 2025, the district commissioner and police questioned whether any crime had even been committed when an indigenous Khyang woman was brutally murdered after an alleged rape, despite having clear evidence of homicide. Her dead body was found stripped naked, the skull crushed. In their press release, police left out a crucial eyewitness account of her being harassed by three Bengalis a day earlier. In 2018, when two Marma sisters went to seek medical care at the district hospital for injuries they sustained after being allegedly raped by two soldiers, the law enforcement agencies unlawfully arrested and held them in an abandoned ward in that same hospital for more than three weeks.

Manipulation of Medical Evidence and Institutional Complicity

Forensic medical examinations are essential in substantiating cases of sexual assault. After filing cases, if public demonstrations demanding justice and condemnation from civil society have already occurred, the medical authority delays in producing the reports and they will eventually most likely return a negative result. In the two Marma sisters’ case, the initial medical report that was prepared and submitted in due time was withheld by the law enforcement agencies, and, two weeks later, a new second report with a negative result was produced by another medical examiner. 

Medical examiners risk serious retribution if they refuse to manipulate reports. On one occasion, a false accusation of corruption was even suddenly made against the examiner a few days after he had produced the first medical report. This ruined his medical career in the public sector. This false case thus simultaneously functioned as a method of punishment for his non-compliance, as coercion to maintain his silence on the ongoing rape case and as a warning to other medical examiners of the consequences of failing to comply.

Medical examiners risk serious retribution if they refuse to manipulate reports. On one occasion, a false accusation of corruption was even suddenly made against the examiner a few days after he had produced the first medical report.

Medical examiners risk serious retribution if they refuse to manipulate reports.

The report on the Marma schoolgirl was withheld for several days. The strictly confidential medical report on this minor girl, containing her photo and personal information, was leaked to, and widely shared on, settler-run online media outlets and a few popular news media outlets even before it had been handed over to police by the hospital authority. It is notable that, in the days leading up to this, settler organizations staged a series of demonstrations asserting that no rape had occurred, indicating their apparent foreknowledge of the report’s predetermined outcome. 

The information in the report had visibly been tampered with. The date of examination was written over with a new date, and was signed by the examiners with the previous date. By doing so, inconsistencies in information could not be avoided. No relevant authority undertook any investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of the confidential report or the discrepancies therein.

Narrative Control through Media

In recent years, mainstream media, online news portals and social media platforms have been extensively used to propagate narratives that delegitimize Indigenous Peoples’ demands for justice. While Indigenous protests receive minimal media coverage, settler organization-led counter demonstrations are extensively reported. Additionally, the media function as pro-military propaganda instruments. At the same time, scores of settlers run online news portals and social media platforms that spread false news about Indigenous resistance. This campaign aims to present Indigenous Peoples as anti-State forces and Indigenous rights defenders as separatists.      

In this context, when Indigenous Peoples intensify their demands for justice for crimes committed against women and girls, a coordinated campaign is launched to shift public debate from justice for victims to doubt as to the intention of the Indigenous protests. Generating a negative medical report is therefore essential in promoting the narrative that “Indigenous separatists” use false rape accusations to create agitation against the military and settler Bengalis with the aim of destabilizing the region.  

It can be fairly stated that the very structure that systematically provides impunity to perpetrators of sexual violence also ensures impunity for the subsequent violence inflicted upon Indigenous communities seeking justice.

It can be fairly stated that the very structure that systematically provides impunity to perpetrators of sexual violence also ensures impunity for the subsequent violence inflicted upon Indigenous communities seeking justice.

In extreme cases, communal attacks on Indigenous communities are orchestrated to intimidate, to reinforce the propaganda narrative and to divert attention away from demands for justice. In the 2014 rape and murder case of the Chakma woman, settlers launched a series of communal attacks on Indigenous villagers using rumors about a missing Bengali child. In the case of the Marma schoolgirl, attacks and arson swept across the district for two days, killing at least three and injuring scores of Indigenous people, as well as destroying property. There are strong allegations that the military backed these attacks and fired on the Indigenous villagers. These attacks followed the same pattern of spreading rumors about Indigenous aggression against settler Bengalis while the coordinated use of social media amplified their impact.   

No investigations into communal attacks were launched by the authorities in either of these two cases. Conversely, in the case of the Marma girl, false charges were brought against more than a dozen Indigenous youth under several laws, including the Special Powers Act, a draconian law frequently used to suppress Indigenous Peoples. It can be fairly stated that the very structure that systematically provides impunity to perpetrators of sexual violence also ensures impunity for the subsequent violence inflicted upon Indigenous communities seeking justice.

This article synthesizes testimonies from Indigenous rights defenders working in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, along with reports from documented sources.

The post Access to Justice Denied: Sexual Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls in Bangladesh appeared first on Debates Indígenas.

Indonesia’s Indigenous women experience disproportionate levels of discrimination. More than one in three Indigenous women is raped during their lifetime, with maternal mortality rates higher than the national average. In Nepal and India, Indigenous women face caste-based violence while, in Bangladesh, Indigenous women are often targeted because of their distinct physical features and religious beliefs.

Indigenous women are also the disproportionate victims of human trafficking. A study by the National Human Rights Commission of Nepal showed that 49 % of the women survivors of  trafficking are Indigenous, followed by Dalit at 15 %. Madhesis account for 6 % and other ethnicities constitute the remaining 29 %. Indigenous Peoples, Dalits, and Madhesis are the most socially, politically, and economically marginalised and excluded communities in Nepal. Access to justice for victims of trafficking remains almost impossible. 

State violations and access to justice

In some countries such as Bangladesh and Myanmar, there is simply no access to justice but rather absolute impunity. While courts are known for setting the jurisprudence in India, in cases of human rights violations, prosecution of the perpetrators requires prior authorization from the government. Under Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code and Section 6 of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1958, prior authorization is required from the executive authorities for the prosecution of public servants and law enforcement personnel.  In armed conflict situations, this authorization is often denied and access to justice thus effectively denied. 

In Nepal, Indigenous women were the victims of sexual violence during the Maoist conflict. In 2019, the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) issued a landmark decision in the case of an Indigenous girl who was the victim of rape, torture and forced labour in 2002. At the age of 14, she was arrested by the Armed Police and the Royal Army and forced to work in the barracks on the construction of a temple. Over that time, she was raped multiple times and subjected to other forms of sexual violence, torture and inhuman treatment. Following the rape, she was not able to urinate and was bleeding profusely and yet received no medical assistance. The Major who raped her threatened to kill her if she told anybody about what had happened.  

In war-torn Myanmar, women have been targeted by the military. In March 2023, Free Expression Myanmar (FEM) reported that more than 300 women and girls, including nurses, students, teachers, activists, and others, had been killed since the coup. Further, the military had used sexual violence as a systematic weapon to punish pro-democracy protesters who were detained: 17 women and girls were raped and killed. In addition, the military junta had arrested 16,432 people, of whom 3,434 were women, and military prison staff often torture female political prisoners. As Myanmar is not party to most international human rights conventions, victims do not have access to justice.

Violence from the majority society

Across the Asian region, Indigenous women face violations from the majority non-Indigenous communities because of their distinct identities, cultural practices and religious beliefs. In most Asian countries, disaggregated data on violence against Indigenous Peoples is not collected, thereby making it impossible to understand the real scale of the violence. Specific laws are consequently not enacted to address access to justice. 

India has enacted progressive laws by making sexual offences specific crimes under the 1989 Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act). Article 3 criminalizes “words, acts or gestures of a sexual nature towards a woman belonging to a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe, knowing that she belongs to a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe” with fines and prison terms of no less than six months and up to five years. However, the crimes continue to take place: 1,137 cases of rape of Indigenous women in 2020, 1,324 in 2021 and 1,347 in 2022. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the law does provide the basis for access to justice.

India ha promulgado leyes progresistas al tipificar los delitos sexuales como crímenes específicos en el marco de la Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act de 1989. El artículo 3 criminaliza “palabras, actos o gestos de naturaleza sexual dirigidos contra una mujer perteneciente a una casta o tribu registrada, a sabiendas de que pertenece a una casta o tribu registrada”, con multas y penas de prisión no inferiores a seis meses y que pueden extenderse hasta cinco años. Sin embargo, los delitos continúan ocurriendo: 1.137 casos de violación de mujeres indígenas en 2020; 1.324 en 2021; y 1.347 en 2022. Aun así, no puede negarse que la legislación proporciona una base para el acceso a la justicia.

In Bangladesh, access to justice for sexual violence cannot be contemplated. Sexual predators are often posted to the Chittagong Hill Tracts region inhabited by Indigenous Peoples.

In Bangladesh, access to justice for sexual violence cannot be contemplated. Sexual predators are often posted to the Chittagong Hill Tracts region inhabited by Indigenous Peoples.

In Bangladesh, protesting rape committed by members of the majority Muslim community often leads to direct attacks from the State agencies upon the Indigenous Peoples. In 2025, three Indigenous youths were shot dead and four others injured by Bangladesh Army personnel in the upazila of Guimara, in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, while protesting the alleged gang rape of an Indigenous schoolgirl. After the shooting, many Indigenous shops were looted and set on fire at Ramesu while nearby houses were also vandalised.

In Bangladesh, under such circumstances, access to justice for sexual violence cannot be contemplated. Sexual predators are often posted to the Chittagong Hill Tracts region inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. On 25 February 2021, Abul Hasnat Mohammad Sohel Rana was jailed in a case filed of sexual harassment of an Indigenous student. After being released, he rejoined the school, which prompted protests. On 20 September 2024, Rana was beaten to death for allegedly raping an Indigenous student belonging to the Tripura community on the school campus but his killing led to another massive assault on Indigenous Peoples in the neighbourhood.

Violations within the community and Indigenous women’s access to justice

Indigenous women also face barriers to accessing justice within their own cultural practices. Inheritance is a critical issue.. As recently as 2025, the Supreme Court of India held that denying a female heir her right to property only exacerbates gender discrimination and that the law must eradicate this practice. Consequently, as per Article 14 of the Constitution relating to the right to equality, the Court determined that both a tribal woman and her legal heirs (her children) are entitled to an equal share in the ancestral property.

Among the Indigenous Chakma community, a Customary Law has been in place since 2014 by which certain people can be declared “Ek Goshchey”, meaning that no other members of the community are allowed to mix socially with the family. These “customs” are often invoked by self-proclaimed patriarchs to violate the rights of Indigenous women and girls. In several rulings, the Tripura High Court ruled the practice of declaring Ek Goshchey or the imposition of social boycotts by the Tripura Rejyo Chakma Samajik Parishad (Tripura State Chakma Social Council) to be unconstitutional.  

Across the communities, Indigenous women face a systematic denial of access to power. In Nagaland, men opposed the 33% reservation for women in the local government bodies, preventing elections from being held for 20 years. Elections were finally held on 26 June 2024, in compliance with a Supreme Court Order.

Digital abuses against Indigenous women and girls 

Violence in the real world is replicated on social media. As the digital space now plays an important role in modern society, Indigenous women and girls face increased risk of online hate and serious online harm at much higher rates than the general population. As many countries are still in the process of developing laws relating to cyber abuse, Indigenous women and girls remain largely beyond effective legal protection and access to justice.

The multiple forms of violence experienced by Indigenous women in Asia reveal a structural pattern of intersectional discrimination that combines gender, ethnic identity, tradition, religion and caste. Impunity, driven by a lack of political will, consolidates a context in which access to justice is the exception rather than the rule. Even where progressive legislation or landmark judicial rulings exist, their implementation faces deep resistance, both within state institutions and within the patriarchal structures of their communities.

In this context, it is essential to adopt comprehensive approaches that guarantee protection of the individual and collective rights of Indigenous women in Asia, while strengthening their political participation, economic autonomy and community leadership. This entails reforming discriminatory legal frameworks, collecting data on violence against Indigenous women, and ensuring culturally appropriate justice mechanisms. Without full recognition of their rights to land, inheritance, their bodies and their voices in the public sphere, it will not be possible to build democratic, plural and egalitarian societies.

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Suno jawano, pyare sathiyon;
Suno – Bharat ke itihas ke dekho re!
Suno – janvirodhi neetiyon ko chhodo re!
Suno – jansangharshon se naata jodo re!

Listen O soldiers, listen dear friends,
Listen – look at the history of India,
Listen – abandon the anti-people policies,
Listen – make ties with the struggles of the people!

The Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution recognizes and safeguards the rights of Indigenous Peoples/Adivasis, who are described therein as Scheduled Tribes, over their land and resources. This emerged from the governance model adopted by the British regime in the mid-19^th century as it faced numerous uprisings of Indigenous Peoples against dispossession and displacement, when their regions were grudgingly legislated as special legal zones, recognizing Adivasi customary laws and traditional practices.

After independence, India’s policymakers continued to ground the country’s development, in the colonial logic of extraction and industrialization by claiming eminent domain on Adivasi lands. This understanding of development broadly encompasses state actions such as dam building, road construction and establishment of public health and education services, for the ‘greater common good’, giving the government the power to take over lands and resources it claims are ultimately vested in the Indian State. Consequently, development as envisioned by the Indian State sanctions exclusion of its Indigenous Peoples, who have largely experienced such development as ‘developmental violence’.

Development as Developmental Violence

This form of violence manifests primarily in two interrelated ways. On the one hand, it takes the form of enforced displacement: although Adivasis constitute only 8.6% of India’s population, they account for nearly half (approximately 47%) of the estimated 70 million people displaced by industrial and mining projects between 1947 and 2010. Major multipurpose irrigation and electricity generation projects, such as the Damodar Valley project (modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority project in the United States), the Nagarjunasagar dam, and the Narmada Valley project, were all constructed on Adivasi lands, resulting in the submergence of villages.

On the other hand, this violence takes the form of expansive repression. Adivasis who resist the loss of their lands and resources are subjected to everyday repression and brutal forms of violence, including mass killings by police firing, such as the Koel Karo massacre. In addition, the reframing of Adivasi territories as areas posing an ‘internal security threat’ has enabled a militarized administration that primarily serves the corporate–State nexus and facilitates the operations of extractive companies.

Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice: accountability of personnel instrumental in developmental violence, as well as just distribution of the resources Adivasis are deprived of.

Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice.

The long Adivasi resistance to this developmental violence has taken many forms, from revolts to armed struggles to mass movements demanding constitutionally guaranteed autonomy, land rights, and rights over natural resources, as enshrined in UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 7, 10, 18,19, 41 and 42, which India has ratified. Adivasis have consistently foregrounded justice-based peace, which includes social, economic and political justice: accountability of personnel instrumental in developmental violence, as well as just distribution of the resources Adivasis are deprived of while the country’s elite enjoys the fruits of ‘development’.

As Gajendra Mandavi, an Adivasi youth activist and ex-General Secretary of Bastar’s erstwhile Moolwasi Bachao Manch [Save the Indigenous Peoples’ Movement], observed in 2022: ‘Newly recruited and arrived CRPF and DRG personnel ask us for our identity cards and Aadhaar cards while strutting down the roads. We’re living here for generations, we should ask them where they have come from, for their identity and Aadhaar cards. Instead they’re asking us, and if we don’t provide details, we are beaten and abused…If we saw public transport plying the roads being constructed, we’d concur it’s development, but there’s nothing like that here.’ Similarly, women blocking a road carrying up to 500 lorries a day for mining purposes in the Amdai Hills in north Bastar in early 2025 said: ‘we’re sitting here for the road we want…only we know how much problem this has created for us. Our little children have to cross this road to go to school, but the mines people don’t bother about them, even racing past this area…’

The Naxalite Insurgency as an Excuse for State Violence Against the Adivasis

The Indian State is attempting to create consent for its version of development by focusing the discourse of ‘internal security threat’ on the Naxalite insurgency based in Adivasi regions, in particular in the Bastar Division of the state of Chhattisgarh in central India, which has made the area difficult to access for mining corporations.

The eco-sensitive, biodiverse forested hills and river systems of Bastar – an area of ~39,000 km² – are home to several Adivasi tribes, as well as abundant reserves of minerals. In 2022–2023, just one district of Bastar, Dantewada, contributed 50% of Chhattisgarh’s mineral revenue of USD153 million. In contrast, Bastar’s human development indicators and living standards remain among India’s lowest.

Since January 2024, there has been an exponential increase in extrajudicial killings, in order to reach a government-declared ‘deadline’ of eradicating Naxalism. Over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, as well as ordinary villagers including children.

Over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, as well as ordinary villagers including children.

India presents the Naxalite movement as the cause of this impoverishment and its extermination essential for development in Adivasi regions. Given the real intention is to facilitate corporate interests, the State has, since a few years, been consolidating a permanent ‘counter-insurgency grid’ of militarized police camps for surveillance, restricting movement and freedom of association and assembly, weaponizing welfare and public services, with a pervasive fear of arbitrary detention and incarceration.

Since January 2024, there has been an exponential increase in extrajudicial killings, in order to reach a government-declared ‘deadline’ of eradicating Naxalism by 31 March, 2026. At the time of writing, over 560 people have been killed, the majority being Naxalite insurgents, who are also Adivasis, as well as ordinary villagers including children. Between 2021 and 2024, villagers also reported five drone attacks and women reported drone surveillance while bathing.

Adivasi Youth Reimagining Peacebuilding Against Developmental Violence

In 2021, an innovative peacebuilding method emerged following police firing on a sit-in protest in Silger village in south Bastar against the setting up of a security camp on Adivasi lands without their knowledge or consent. Four people were killed. The protest grew into a movement led by Adivasi youth. Many of these young men and women had as children witnessed members of their family or village being killed or raped by the state-sponsored Salwa Judum militia in 2005–2011, and experienced the endless cycles of repression that followed. At Silger, they drew on communitarian Indigenous praxis to build Moolwasi Bachao Manch (MBM) as a platform organizing decentralized grassroots Adivasi mass movements against the militarization and corporatization of their ancestral lands. Similarly others such as Maad Bachao Andolan [Save Mount Maad Struggle] in north Bastar also emerged.

In 2023, Raghu Midiyami, ex-President MBM Bastar Division, described how their advocacy was rooted in Indigenous stewardship, sustainable livelihoods and democratic participation, and sought to safeguard Indigenous land and forest rights through demanding an end to the state’s developmental violence: ‘we have organised our structure from village to panchayat to block to district committees [who] coordinate with each other for common actions. Our focus is to raise our issues and voices against all forms of injustice happening to our people, such as fake encounters, drone attacks, laying of wide roads, felling innumerable valuable trees, setting up camps illegally and sexual violence on our women and girls. … Whenever a camp is planned or set up, the people of that area inform us and then we take stock of our strength and presence there and plan for a protest.’

The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

The State, however, cast such Adivasi rights-based mobilization and peacebuilding as a threat to its corporate agenda, in blatant violation of UNDRIP Articles 3, 4, 10, 18 and 19, and also in violation of the Adivasis’ rights to freedom of association and expression as per the ICCPR and UDHR, reiterated in a Special Rapporteurs’ joint statement in September 2025. The authorities repeatedly humiliated, intimidated, detained and arrested youth leaders to dismantle the movements, but they only grew.

Finally, on 30 October 2024, the Chhattisgarh Government quietly declared MBM an ‘unlawful organization’ under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (CSPSA), deeming that its justice-based peacebuilding constituted ‘instigation of the general public’ against the state’s ‘vision of development’. MBM pursued every available legal remedy, including representation to the government, petitioning the Chhattisgarh High Court and appealing to the Supreme Court of India, without getting any relief. While the ban lapsed on 30 October 2025, it remains in force de facto: ~40 Adivasi youth linked to MBM have been undergoing imprisonment for varying periods. WHRD Suneeta Pottam, Raghu Midiyami, Gajendra Mandavi and many others are still in prison.

Why Spotlight Bastar in Solidarity Building with Indigenous Peoples?

In this context, as the Indian State attempts to weaken the Naxalites through indiscriminate killings and forced surrenders, it is also dismantling the mass justice-based peacebuilding movements, incarcerating and discrediting its youth leaders. This simultaneous approach is speeding up the State’s violent redesign of Bastar to clear the region for mining interests. Officially, the state’s military policy has been declared as ‘clear, build, hold’.

MBM’s experience of engagement with state representatives for its advocacy work and its unlawful proscription exemplifies the relationship of the Indian State with its Indigenous communities. Whenever the Adivasis have demanded participatory parity and their constitutionally guaranteed autonomy and right to customary self-governance, including respecting their right to Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC), the State that privileges private capital over its own citizens, has betrayed their faith and its own obligations to human rights.

In Bastar, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

In Bastar, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

The key legislations that operationalize the Fifth Schedule constitutional protections in Adivasi regions, mandating the authority of Gram Sabhas (village assemblies) in local decision-making, securing individual and collective rights over forest lands and resources, including FPIC in planning of mining, industrial, infrastructure or militarization project on Adivasi lands, have never been implemented in letter or spirit. Rather, in Bastar, since the Salwa Judum, the Constitution remains in a state of suspension due to the complicity of the legislature, judiciary and the executive in the developmental violence in the region.

MBM consistently stood in solidarity with international Indigenous and other struggles through, for example, observing International Indigenous Peoples’ Day and International Women’s Day. Their public statements also appealed for global solidarity for Bastar. While those calls have been silenced right now, the continued existential threat to Adivasi communities from state militarization in Bastar and neighbouring regions necessitates they must echo alongside other Indigenous movements across Latin America, Asia and Africa.

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This essay asserts the limits of state-centred peace and invites a rehumanising approach to self-determination. The authors weave together the Indigenous experience and how it may contribute to the global peace discourse. With this in mind, self-determination must be understood more broadly as a continuous political praxis grounded in collective identity, responsibility, and dignity. Lessons from the Naga struggle call for recovering an Indigenous worldview and praxis of self-determination to unlock the path toward humanisation and JustPeace.

The Westphalian Constraint on Self-Determination

The concept of sovereignty that emerged from the Westphalian order reorganised political authority around territorially bounded states. While this framework stabilised interstate relations, it simultaneously marginalised political communities whose sovereignty traditions pre-existed and exceeded the Westphalian order. Ironically, self-determination, a right associated with all peoples, was reduced to state-determination.

In the decolonisation era, self-determination was proclaimed ‘presumptively universal in scope … to benefit all segments of humanity,’ yet, in practice, it was selectively applied. Colonial territories became independent states, but Indigenous Peoples encapsulated within those states were rarely recognised as peoples with right to self-determination.

For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship.

For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship.

From an Indigenous perspective, decolonisation remains profoundly incomplete. Postcolonial states inherited colonial territorial logic, legal hierarchies, and governance models that prioritised national homogeneity over Indigenous plurality. As a result, many Indigenous Peoples experienced decolonisation not as liberation, but as a continuation of political domination under new authority.

Decolonisation without Indigenous political recognition is merely a change of administrators rather than transforming political relationships. For Indigenous Peoples, including the Nagas, decolonisation goes beyond state independence and means restoring political agency, historical voice, and moral authorship. This understanding is reflected in broader Asian Indigenous movements that articulate self-governance not simply as legal recognition, but as a democratic and ethical practice rooted in community and collective agency.

Self-Determination as Lived History

For Nagas, self-determination has been embedded in lived political experience, customary governance, and collective memory. Prior to incorporation into the Indian state, Naga people exercised political autonomy through village republics, inter-village alliances, and customary institutions grounded in moral accountability. Its political consciousness is also influenced by historical events compounded by moral injury and political denial that wounds collective dignity. Despite its history, the Naga political identity has persisted as a narrative of continuity that consistently defended its political existence.

Truly, Naga nationalism is a question of justice and not ethnic sentiments. Its moral-political assertion refuses to accept that a people can be administratively absorbed without ethical consent that has spanned generations. This assertion has been carried across generations. Self-determination in the Naga case remains a sustained political memory—a form of historical responsibility to ancestors, community, and future generations.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration.

The state-led Indo–Naga peace process exemplifies conflict management rather than conflict transformation. While this strategy has reduced armed confrontation, it has produced fragmentation, weakened social cohesion, expanded corruption and impunity, eroded traditional institutions, and deepened public disillusionment toward conventional state-led peace processes.

State institutions, under the banner of development and peace, have intruded deeply into Naga society, while strategic cultural assimilation continues through education, administration, and economic integration. Protracted negotiations without resolution have normalised injustice, causing negative societal affects. Sadly, the peace process has weakened Naga cooperation and eventually produces compliance rather than consent.

Rehumanising Self-Determination

To move beyond this impasse, self-determination must be rehumanised and its ethical and cultural dimensions emancipated. Indigenous Peoples remind us that self-determination is not a destination, but a struggle for the recovery of dignity, wisdom, and solidarity. In this context, Indigenous activist Kenneth Deer asserts that no one owns the definition of self-determination and explains it as relational, shared, and negotiated. Ultimately, rehumanising self-determination requires restoring its meaning, confidence, and moral agency within political communities.

In a similar vein, Gam Shimray, Secretary-General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), argues that “recovering meaning also means rebuilding this relational foundation — reviving the practices and environments that allow meaning-making to flourish again.” Without this relational recovery, political claims remain hollow. Self-determination cannot survive as a purely juridical concept; it must live within social relationships, cultural practices, and shared responsibility.

Ultimately, decolonisation is a rehumanising process that dignifies political relationships so that peoples are no longer treated as objects of governance but as co-creators of history. Thus, when self-determination is rehumanised, it becomes a requisite for ethical governance, peace and healing. Self-determination, therefore, remains a continuous political praxis. It is a right that people always have, not a right that derives from a single historical event.

Rethinking Sovereignty from the Naga Experience

The Naga experience compels us to rethink sovereignty itself. The dominant political discourse continues to equate sovereignty with exclusive territorial control exercised by states. Within this framework, sovereignty is treated primarily as a legal attribute of the state rather than as a people’s moral and political reality. Indigenous Peoples unsettle this assumption because sovereignty has never been understood merely as control over territory, but as political responsibility: a responsibility for collective identity, community continuity, moral order, and accountability to future generations, a relational ethic emphasised across Indigenous governance discourses.

Sovereignty, in this sense, is defined by the capacity to sustain a people as a moral and political community and not by dominating the space. It is exercised not only through formal institutions, but through memory, customary practice, and intergenerational responsibility. From this perspective, philosopher Hans Köchler observes that “it is not the state that is ‘eternal’ which enjoys ‘inalienable rights,’ but the people as a collective social and cultural reality.” When international law and political discourse centre on states rather than peoples, they produce a democratic deficit in which political legitimacy is derived from territorial inheritance rather than from the consent and continuity of political communities.

The Naga struggle demonstrates that sovereignty imposed without political consent cannot achieve moral legitimacy. Collective political will and imagination can creatively address the Naga question.  From this perspective, sovereignty must be reimagined as layered and relational. Such an understanding situates the state within a wider moral and political ecology.

Indigenous Self-Determination and the Future of Democratic Imagination

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms that self-determination includes self-government and effective participation in decisions affecting human beings. Yet, in practice, these standards remain persistently subordinated to state sovereignty claims. Recognition without implementation has become a central technique of contemporary colonial governance.

These contradictions raise a deeper question: whether modern political systems are capable of recognising political plurality without fear, and diversity without domination. The Naga experience exemplifies this contradiction as it is often framed through a security lens. Yet its persistence reveals a deeper democratic failure: the inability of postcolonial democracy to recognise peoples as political equals rather than as administrative populations.

The Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence.

The Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence.

The Nagas resonate with Indigenous experiences across the world, who consistently challenge the assumption that state sovereignty by design extinguishes prior political existence. In Latin America, North America, the Pacific, and Asia, Indigenous movements have insisted that encapsulation into modern states cannot dissolve their status as political communities. If democracy is to remain essential and relevant, it must adapt to accommodate layered sovereignties, overlapping identities, and differentiated political belonging. Unity imposed without recognition produces neither stability nor justice, but compliance without legitimacy.

From this perspective, the Naga struggle is a mirror that reflects the unresolved tension between modern state sovereignty and Indigenous political existence. It exposes the limits of a democratic imagination that has not yet learned to recognise peoples as co-creators of political order. In this sense, the Naga struggle is not only about Naga destiny. It raises the questions about the future credibility of postcolonial democracy itself.

Self-Determination as Humanisation

If self-determination is ultimately a question of human dignity and not territorial management, then its meaning cannot be exhausted by constitutional formulas or administrative arrangements. It must be understood as a moral and political claim to exist as a people whose history, identity, and future cannot be suppressed and erased by institutional convenience. Indigenous advocates argue that until political recognition aligns with human dignity, peace remains administratively managed, a condition found in the Naga context as well as among Indigenous Peoples in Asia.

The Naga experience illustrates this with particular clarity. What is at stake is not only a political settlement, but the recognition of a people as legitimate co-creators of political order rather than residual populations managed within inherited territorial frameworks. In this regard, rehumanising self-determination means rehumanising sovereignty itself. When sovereignty is reduced to territorial possession, it becomes an instrument of exclusion. However, when reimagined as accountable to history, to community, and to future generations, sovereignty becomes a foundation for ethical governance. A democratic order that cannot recognise Indigenous political existence ultimately weakens its own claim to democratic credibility.

Self-determination, when rehumanised, ceases to be a problem to be solved. It becomes a relationship to be honoured which transforms coexistence from forced accommodation into ethical partnership. Ultimately, self-determination is a moral force, a social movement, a political imagination, and a human aspiration. It is the foundation upon which all other rights rest. When self-determination is integral in the search for dignity and when peoples are placed at the centre of the humanisation process, then spaces for renewal, reconciliation and healing open. 

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Amid the chaos, several homes of political leaders, including the prime minister’s, were torched as he and the home minister resigned. Many parliamentarians went missing for days. Iconic sites such as the Parliament and Supreme Court were also burned down. Although an interim government, formed after talks with Gen Z leaders, is slowly restoring services, the judiciary remains paralyzed—thousands of legal documents were destroyed, including several writ petitions filed by the Indigenous communities of Nepal.

One of these petitions is against a cable car project on a sacred mountain that the Indigenous Limbu community have historically identified as Mukkumlung, renamed about a century ago as Pathibhara, after a Hindu goddess. In more recent decades, Pathibhara has become a popular religious site for Hindu pilgrims. Mukkumlung forms part of the ancestral Limbu territory and is a sensitive geographic region as it borders Tibet (China) and Sikkim (India). It is also geologically sensitive as it forms part of the Himalayan formation, one of the most biodiverse ecological zones. To safeguard it, the Nepal government declared this zone as the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project in 1997.    

Development and green transition vs Indigenous sacred sites?

“I don’t think we should give up our sacred lands for the sake of development. We are not even going to give up our community forest, let alone our temples, shrines, and sacred spaces,”says Sarita Ghale of Khasur village, in Northern Nepal, in the short documentary Marsyangdi Wile Ri’iba: May you live as long as the river. The film explores the tensions between Indigenous ancestral wisdom, the agency of land’s invisible guardians and the relentless force of ‘progress’ driving Nepal’s hydropower economy. The Gurung language title is a blessing from the elders to the younger generation: “(…) may you live as long as the Simal tree, may you be as strong as the rocks in the Marsyangdi river”.

This short film forms part of the Twin documentary project “Human rights beyond the human?”, produced as part of the six-year interdisciplinary RIVERS research project (2019-2026), funded by the European Research Council (ERC). RIVERS examines the relationship between humans and nature and the role of law through fieldwork in Nepal, Colombia, Guatemala and the United Nations.  It’s Colombian twin, Aty Seikuinduwa: A Judge Between Worlds, follows the spiritual and legal journey of Indigenous Judge Belkis Izquierdo. This intimate portrayal of Aty Seikuinduwa, Judge Belkis’ spiritual name, meaning “mother beyond the darkness”, shows how she brings the living land, multiple life systems, and Indigenous spiritual practices into the courtroom.

What the Nepali government, which endorses the project, and the private company constructing it do not reveal is what would be lost in the process – a complete erasure of Limbu culture and destruction of nature.

What the Nepali government, which endorses the project, and the private company constructing it do not reveal is what would be lost in the process – a complete erasure of Limbu culture and destruction of nature.

Together, these two films challenge the dominant legal frameworks by foregrounding more-than-human voices and Indigenous jurisprudence, offering a powerful reflection on legal pluralism, spiritualism and resistance to extractivism. Overlapping with the concerns these documentaries raise, the cable car project exemplifies the latest onslaught of ‘development’ against sacred land. Registered under ‘Pathibhara Devi Darshan Private Limited’, a private company led by a Nepali billionaire, this 21-million USD project would connect the base of the mountain with its top, flying over the pilgrimage trail that currently snakes its way through the hilly forest, claiming acres of forest.

The company claims that this cable car would ease the pilgrims’ commute while boosting tourism and creating jobs, so ‘bringing development’ to Taplejung district. In such claims, what the Nepali government endorsing the project, and the private company constructing it, do not reveal is what would be lost in the process – a complete erasure of Limbu culture and destruction of nature through the ‘Disneyfication’ of the sacred land as resorts, cafes, hotels and a skating zone, all of which are planned for construction on top of the sacred site.

Bureaucratic and legal violence

As part of the post-war peace process following the end of Nepal’s decade-long ‘People’s War’ in 2006, the country ratified International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1989) and endorsed the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007. These human rights instruments recognize Indigenous Peoples as collective-rights holders, including the right to self-determination, land, territory, and natural resources, and establish the right of FPIC – Free, Prior, Informed Consultation and Consent over decisions affecting their rights.

Initially, Nepal was hailed as a regional leader in Indigenous rights protection. It was the first Asian country to ratify ILO Convention 169 and, in its 2015 Constitution, explicitly recognized Indigenous Peoples’ rights.  The country also ratified the 1978 World Heritage Convention, and the 2010 Convention on Intangible Heritage; articles 26 and 34 of its Constitution furthermore protect communities’ rights to preserve religious sites and cultural practices.

Multilateral development banks and the Nepalese government systematically fail to uphold Indigenous rights, including FPIC, in major hydropower projects.

Multilateral development banks and the Nepalese government systematically fail to uphold Indigenous rights, including FPIC, in major hydropower projects.

Almost 20 years later, Nepal’s leadership has proved to be a false dawn. A recent report “Hanging by a Thread: Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in Renewable Energy Transition”, published by Accountability Council and Lawyers’ Association of Human Rights of Nepali Indigenous Peoples, documents how multilateral development banks and the Nepalese government systematically fail to uphold Indigenous rights, including FPIC, in major hydropower projects.

Besides destroying sacred sites, the Nepal government, in endorsing the cable car project, has approved the cutting down of thousands of trees, destroying the habitat of threatened animal species and, in the process, dismantling the very reason why it created the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area Project in the first place. More recently, this has morphed into full-blown violence meted out against the peaceful community protestors. The armed police force has been deployed  to aggressively clamp down on protests, throwing tear gas canisters inside private houses in the middle of the night, destroying surveillance cameras, putting people behind bars, physically assaulting and opening fire on the protestors, and severely wounding people, while filing cases against the protestors for ‘creating unrest’.

Knowledge that comes from the territories

Nepal is now forging much-needed reforms on many fronts. Amid state-induced violence, the legal future of Mukkumlung rests in the hands of Nepal’s Supreme Court – which is currently literally rising from its ashes. Could this High Court finally transform Nepal’s leadership in Indigenous Peoples’ rights protection on paper into progressive jurisprudence, allowing the Limbu sacred mountain to win its legal battle? 

The innovative Indigenous jurisprudence of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace may offer new legal pathways for Nepal’s court cases on harm to Indigenous lands from development and green transition projects. Since its 1991 Constitution recognized ethnic and cultural diversity, Colombia has built a strong body of multicultural jurisprudence. Yet it was only in 2014 that the judiciary appointed its first Indigenous assistant magistrate, Belkis Izquierdo Torres—a historic milestone. Four years later, she became one of the 31 judges of the Peace Tribunal, alongside three other Indigenous judges.

“To recognize the Territory as a victim means acknowledging it is alive, that it is a sentient being, that it is a subject of rights”.

“To recognize the Territory as a victim means acknowledging it is alive, that it is a sentient being, that it is a subject of rights”.

Created as part of the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), the JEP investigates and prosecutes cases linked to the armed conflict, which disproportionately affected Indigenous and Afro communities. These groups secured the inclusion of the Agreement’s late-added Ethnic Chapter, guaranteeing recognition of their rights and territories within the transitional justice process. In line with its victim-centered mandate, this tribunal has elaborated a participatory territorial based investigation methodology.

As Judge Belkis Izquierdo explains in the short film: ” [Judges] need to get out of the confines of the office a little … to feel, to smell the Territory. …. Our [Indigenous] knowledge comes not only from human reason; it comes from the Territories because knowledge is territorialized.”  The idea that land itself can be a bearer of legal knowledge stands in stark contrast to Nepal’s jurisprudence on Indigenous rights.  The judge adds: “To recognize the Territory as a victim means acknowledging it is alive, that it is a sentient being, that it is a subject of rights. That, within the context of the armed conflict, it has suffered, it has been damaged, and it is still in pain. And that it needs to have a voice in the judicial process so that this harm can be acknowledged and repaired.”

Could Nepal’s Supreme Court set a legal benchmark in South Asia?

This marks a significant legal milestone: it is now recognized that it is not only human beings, but also sacred sites, spiritual beings and their interrelationships that can suffer harm. Indigenous territories in Colombia are thus accorded rights to truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition— rights previously reserved for individuals and groups affected by armed conflict.

In a similar vein, Nepal’s Supreme Court could consider an in-situ visit or a fact-finding mission to Mukkumlung to directly assess the territorial disputes and alleged violations. Over the past decade, the  Inter-American Court of Human Rights and several Latin American high courts have conducted similar visits to Indigenous and Afro communities, gathering additional evidence and hearing all parties involved. The Inter-American Court’s first in-situ visit took place in 2012 in the emblematic case Pueblo Indígena Kichwa de Sarayaku v. Ecuador, where the judges traveled by plane and canoe to hold proceedings within the Amazonian community’s territory. Since then, this regional Court has carried out 15 in-situ visits, six of them to Indigenous communities across Latin America.

If Indigenous movements worldwide are understood as a permanent struggle and resistance, the historic ruling in Colombia under Judge Belkis represents a monumental moment to which Nepal might aspire.

If Indigenous movements worldwide are understood as a permanent struggle and resistance, the historic ruling in Colombia under Judge Belkis represents a monumental moment to which Nepal might aspire.

Even though the Indigenous communities in Nepal remain skeptical about their country’s judicial system – often perceiving a structural bias against Indigenous cases – there a few alternatives but to turn to the national courts. The state has shown no political will to upholds its international human rights obligations. Indicatively, during a hearing in the Supreme Court in May 2025 on the cable car project, a company lawyer dismissed Indigenous claims over the sacred land by saying: “It is like listening to fiction and poetry … their argument belongs in the stone age”. The irony, one could argue, lies in how much such racist remarks sound archaic when compared to innovative legal practices, such as in Colombia, where a plurality of knowledge systems is integrated into environmental and Indigenous litigation.

As Shree Linkhim, one of the young Indigenous leaders of the #NoCableCar movement reflected in a private conversation: “When you think of it, this [the Indigenous movement] really goes beyond cancelling cable cars and hydropower projects. At the heart of it all, the struggle is really about pushing to transform the character of the Nepali state.” Easier said than done, but that is their resolve. If Indigenous movements worldwide are understood as a permanent struggle and resistance, the historic ruling in Colombia under Judge Belkis represents a monumental moment to which Nepal might aspire. Whether it ever gets there will depend on how the character and practice of the Nepali state and judiciary evolve in the wake of the Gen Z uprising and the upcoming 2026 elections that promise to reshape the country’s political landscape.

The post When Sacred Land Meets the Law: Stories of Legal Resistance from Nepal and Colombia appeared first on Debates Indígenas.