42 – Changing Contours of Legitimacy and Governance in India

Long Abstract

Legitimacy and governance as co-constitutive processes in the context of political assertions and socio-political movements are under-analysed aspects in tribal/indigenous mobilisations in India. By moving away from the traditional state-agency-actor analytical approach, the panel focuses on legitimacy and governance as two interrelated yet distinct aspects of democratic framework in India. More specifically it foregrounds governance and legitimacy as key sites of tensions, negotiations, and reconfiguration of social relations and political identities.

The panel invites two kinds of broad contributions. Firstly, scholarship that explores processes of governance at the regional level to trace various forms of political grievances, mobilisation and participation. Secondly, studies centred on the idea of legitimacy – defined broadly – as context-specific, normative contestations over spaces of participation and power relations within social movements.

Combined together, the panel aims to demonstrate how these ideas and concepts highlight a deepening of democratic norms and emerging forms of challenges faced by Adivasi and indigenous mobilisations in central, eastern and north-eastern states of India.

With the aim of seeking new scholarship emerging from the region on this topic, the panel invites contributions of scholars engaged in trans-disciplinary, decolonial, and innovative methodological approaches that flatten the binary between the field and theory. Through contributions from adivasi, indegenous and tribal scholars, the panel intends to recenter the people and their voices within the practice of governance and legitimacy.