WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

The Indo-Myanmar frontier, historically sustained by fluid ecological, cultural, and commercial exchanges, is undergoing profound transformation as climate change reshapes landscapes and livelihoods. Drawing on oral histories from Naga, Mizo, and Kuki-Chin borderland communities, this presentation explores how environmental disruptions—such as erratic rainfall, landslides, crop failures, changing river courses, and forest depletion—intersect with the region’s geopolitically sensitive border regime. For generations, these communities relied on shifting cultivation, forest gathering, and seasonal mobility across what is now an international boundary, guided by ecological cues and longstanding kinship ties. Their testimonies evoke memories of predictable agricultural cycles, abundant forests, and shared cross-border resource practices that are now destabilized by climatic uncertainty.

These oral narratives reveal how climate change interacts with militarization, tightening border controls, and declining access to natural resources, creating new forms of vulnerability, livelihood stress, and displacement. Elders recall a living landscape once experienced as open and relational, now experienced as both environmentally fragile and politically constrained. By foregrounding lived experiences, the study demonstrates how climate change is not only an environmental phenomenon but also a social and geopolitical force that alters cultural memory, border ecologies, and local notions of belonging.

Ultimately, the research argues that oral histories provide critical insights into how borderland societies interpret environmental transformation, negotiate new risks, and reimagine their relationship with the land in an era of climatic and political uncertainty.

Abstract (250 words)
The Indo-Myanmar frontier, historically a porous cultural and commercial corridor, has undergone profound transformation in the contemporary era often described as “post-globalization.” While global connectivity has widened through digital communication and transnational economic flows, physical borders in South Asia have simultaneously hardened due to intensifying geopolitical anxieties, ethnic conflicts, and strategic rivalries. This presentation draws on oral histories collected from Naga, Mizo, and Kuki-Chin communities to examine how borderland residents interpret and experience these shifts. For generations, these communities engaged in free and routine movement across what is now India and Myanmar, sustaining kinship networks, barter trade, shared festivals, and ritual landscapes that predated modern territorial boundaries. Their narratives reveal a layered interplay between memory and geopolitics: recollections of shared ancestry and seasonal migration coexist with lived realities of fencing projects, militarized checkpoints, refugee flows from post-coup Myanmar, and restrictions on traditional livelihoods. These testimonies capture both loss and adaptation, illustrating how long-standing cultural continuities persist amid new forms of surveillance and securitization.
By foregrounding lived experiences, the presentation highlights how global disconnections—driven by political instability, China’s growing strategic presence, insurgency dynamics, and India’s evolving border governance—shape everyday life in the frontier. Ultimately, it argues that oral histories not only illuminate the human dimensions of geopolitical transformation but also challenge mainstream state-centric narratives of borders, sovereignty, and globalization’s uneven retreat in Northeast India. Through memory, border communities offer alternative understandings of mobility, belonging, and regional interconnectedness in a world where borders simultaneously close and global influences deepen.