Revisiting the frontier: colonial legacies and lived realities of Himalayan border-worlds

This special issue takes the Himalayas as a crucial site for studying the evolution of territory, politics and governance. It focuses on the legacies of colonial practices of frontier-making in Himalayan borderland polities. Drawing from different disciplines including history, geography and anthropology, the papers in this special issue conceptually and empirically engage with the relationships between frontiers, borders and the different ways of formulating and claiming territories implicated in their construction and contestation. In doing so, we show how a postcolonial Himalayan lens illuminates critical perspectives for the development of theory and research in territorial politics and the governance of space. Ultimately, this special issue provides a way to move beyond normative debates and teleological histories of borders and frontiers; rather, it exploits the tension between these concepts to draw more nuanced observations from the continuing encounters between state, society and ecology in postcolonial borderlands.