Evading and inviting states in ‘No-Man’s-Lands’: Headhunters in Zomia’s blank spaces (1944–1964)

Abstract This article studies the aftermath of the Second World and decolonization (1945–1960) in the Indo-Burmese highlands, challenging predominant notions of state-building. Using the ‘Zomia’ heuristic, it argues how trans-border Naga tribal communities residing in so-called ‘No-Man’s-Lands’ between British India’s Assam province and Burma neither entirely resisted states, nor attracted uniform state interest. This dual refusal of states and social actors reveals negotiated sovereignty practices, using violence. The article illustrates the Naga tribes’ agency in negotiating with colonial and post-colonial states by using mimetic discourses of primitive violence, represented by headhunting. Violence served as a significant means of communication between communities and state agents, amounting to shifting cultural and territorial boundaries. Such practices selectively securitized colonial frontiers that became international borders post-decolonization. Gradually, violence and the desire for development invited state extension here. The article reveals that uneven state-building and developmental exclusions by bordering created conditions for violence to emerge. It engages scholarship on ‘Blank Spaces’ to analyse the varying sovereignty arrangements that produced ‘checkered’ zones. It highlights the relationship between spatial history and violence to explain the persistence of coercive development and demands for more borders and states today across highland Asia. It uncovers the embeddedness of violence in creating and challenging developmental and democratic exclusions in post-colonial nation-building projects. The analysis complicates imperial legacies of producing territorial enclosures within democracies, allowing exceptional violence to occur. More broadly, it complicates contemporary geopolitical cartographic contests and stakes of state-possession, using historical methods with approaches from anthropology and political geography.