2026-06-27 –, Room 208 (Seats 40)
World history has often been written through narratives of ever-expanding connectivity—trade, migration, empire, and exchange. Yet in the Andaman–Nicobar Islands, the Shompen people of Great Nicobar present an alternative historical model: one of deliberate opacity, non-disclosure, and refusal. Long described as a “remote” or “vanishing” tribe, the Shompen have persistently resisted integration into the legal, ethnographic, and archival regimes of the Indian state. Their refusal is not merely political, but ontological: a world-making stance that unsettles assumptions of transparency and assimilation as universal historical trajectories.
This paper argues that the Shompen’s stance of refusal provides a critical vantage point from which to rethink world history in a moment when globalization has faltered. Nationalism, protectionism, and closed borders mark the present, yet forms of interconnection remain—ecological, material, and planetary. By reading the Shompen through frameworks of opacity and Indigenous sovereignty, I propose that histories of interdiction and refusal are as world-historical as those of circulation and exchange. The Shompen remind us that to “be global” is not always to be connected; it can also mean to survive, endure, and persist at the edges of globalizing projects.
Placing this case within Asian and Indian Ocean contexts, the paper suggests that histories of refusal illuminate new ways of conceptualizing borders, sovereignty, and interconnection beyond globalization. Rather than marginal footnotes, such refusals are central to world history’s task: to grapple with a planet that is at once intensely entangled and unevenly open.
Surabhi Baijal is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer whose work spans environmental humanities, feminist legal theory, critical animal studies, and postcolonial ecological thought. She has presented at major international conferences including the World Congress of Environmental History, World-Ecology Research Network, and the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Her essays explore the politics of disposability, ecological grief, and care as resistance. Drawing from both lived experience and academic training, she works at the intersection of rescue work, justice, and the emotional toll of witnessing cruelty in collapsing urban ecosystems.