Presentation short abstract

The paper explores how the contested Kaihlam Wildlife Sanctuary reveals tensions between state-led conservation and Indigenous resistance, exposing the limits of legibility.

Presentation long abstract

The paper examines the contested declaration of Kaihlam Wildlife Sanctuary (KWS) in Manipur, India, as a site where state-led conservation meets Indigenous resistance. Drawing on James C. Scott’s concept of legibility and Michel Foucault's governmentality, I interrogate how the state’s attempt to render forests governable through legal and bureaucratic technologies—maps, laws, and notifications—produces not governance but friction. While the sanctuary exists on paper, it remains materially and politically unrealised on the ground, revealing the limits of state legibility. The paper traces how colonial and postcolonial forest laws have continually redefined tribal land relations, yet Indigenous institutions of chieftainship continue to resist incorporation into state frameworks. By situating this failure of "environmentality" (Agrawal 2005) within the broader politics of recognition and resource control, the study argues that illegibility itself becomes a form of resistance, where local communities sustain alternative regimes of visibility and belonging that defy the state’s cartographic imagination.