The making of a hydrofrontier: geopolitics, securitization and ‘green’ energy imaginaries in India's eastern borderlands

Abstract

In recent years, frontier thinking has mushroomed across a range of environmental social sciences seeking to understand the ongoing exploitation of regions identified as politically, economically, and culturally marginal. Scholars emphasize that frontiers are the products of both geographical imaginations and material forces of extraction and exploitation with often dire consequences for the regions' inhabitants. Despite decades of academic work on frontiers, few studies have focused specifically on the intersecting processes and actors that have made hydropower development critical to understanding frontiers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This paper introduces the hydrofrontier to emphasize that the advent of hydropower development introduces novel spatial and temporal dynamics to frontier regions, which are constantly assembling ideas, peoples, ecologies, and political-economic processes across diverse and fragmented spaces. Nowhere are these sites and assemblages more evident than in the hydrofrontier of Northeast India, a region at the juncture of South and Southeast Asia long targeted by state planners as critical to national energy goals. While sharing many characteristics of other frontier regions, Northeast India's hydrofrontier assembles discourses and practices centered on economic development and renewable energy aligned with complex processes of securitization in novel ways. The notion of the hydrofrontier offers distinct and broadly applicable insights into our understandings of conflicts over hydropower and environmental conflicts more broadly, which can be applied to many of the world's frontier regions. While primarily theoretical, the paper draws from recent fieldwork by the first author and her reflections as a person from the region.