Although the category of “indigenous people” is a relatively new invention, the groups of people labelled as “indigenous” have continuously asserted their concerns and claims for self-assertion since South Asia’s independence and even before by using different labels for expressing difference and asserting claims within national realms. Nevertheless, since the category “indigenity” has been adopted, it seems that these concerns are exerted in a more powerful way and are heard by supra-national and global actors.
The presentation is based on different periods of research on minority issues in Bangladesh conducted over a time span of ten years and seeks to trace the changes which have taken place on the terrain of indigenous activism. It is based on the assumption that the Bangladeshi indigenous people’s activism is directly linked to the increased attention directed at indigenous issues at a global level. The adaptation “indigenous people” itself is related to the formation of global institutions such as the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the announcement of two International Decades on the Worlds’ Indigenous People from 1995-2004 and 2005-2014. It can be assumed that Bangladeshi activists make use of these new opportunities to cooperate and network with other indigenous groups at regional and global levels. Employing the label “indigenous” for self-representation enables interest groups to participate in a global arena. This participation at a supra-national level in turn enhances their bargaining position when asserting their concerns related to minority rights vis-à-vis the Bangladeshi nation-state.
Of interest here are, first of all, new modes of translocal networking. It can be observed that the activist groups from the Chittagong Hill Tracts have already been able to attract global attention in the past. The official end of the armed conflict in 1997 opened new spaces for articulating indigenous claims in Bangladesh, which, in effect spilt over to other, less recognised groups with weaker representative bodies and activist appearance.
Secondly, the Peace Accord in 1997 gained much regional and global attention and the claims of indigenous groups were recognized beyond Bangladesh which expressed itself in changing developmental agendas and donor policies concerning minorities in Bangladesh. What we find today is a well organised network of indigenous people’s institutions and networks which transcend the boundaries of the nation-state to a considerable extent. This, in turn, instigates dynamic changes in the local and national actor landscape and reinforces new constellations, including both, coalitions and conflicts.
These new formations need to be looked upon by taking not just ethnic difference, but also gender, class as well as affiliations to political parties into account. The newly emerged arena is characterised by changing constellations particularly with regard to development policies and aspirations to attain recognition within the state. The presentation will be based on empirical material collected during fieldwork in local sites as well as among indigenous activists in Bangladesh.

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In this paper, I focus on the dangerous and violent consequences of fixing and naturalizing ethno-national differences through traditional notions of nation-state sovereignty. I argue against the privileging of the nation-state as the primary and exclusive form of political association and for the decoupling of citizenship rights and protections from ethno-national identity. Given our contemporary landscapes of mobility and immobility, failing sovereigns and competing ethnocrats, new global actors, crises, and challenges we need to be rethinking our notions of political association beyond container states and fixed territorial spaces. The practice of fixing identities into differential political statuses and arbitrary geographic borders – or sacred spaces - is not only dangerous but also out of synch with new technologies of time and space. While many pundits suggest that it is the lack of defined or secure borders that encourages violent conflicts and tempts traffickers to defy checkpoints and border guards, I argue that it is the proliferation of hard borders (symbolic, legal, and material walls, fences, and frontiers) that incites violence, provides mechanisms for domination, and undermines opportunities for peaceful and sustainable political association. We need to rethink the spaces, places, and players of political association. The soft border alternative that I propose - based on transnational citizenship exercised within and across multiple and fluid spaces of political association - is such an attempt.

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