Aditya Kiran Kakati

Aditya Kiran Kakati is an Early-Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and SOAS, London University. He is also an Associate Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, IIAS, Leiden and a Research Fellow (non-stipendiary), at The Highland Institute, Kohima, Nagaland. Aditya works as an Associate Editor for The Highlander Journal that seeks to promote conversations on global highlands that challenge nation-centric paradigms and push boundaries of traditional area studies. His PhD dissertation was titled Living on the Edge: How encounters with global war (WWII) re-made the Indo-Burma frontiers into bordered-worlds, which is under revision as a book manuscript. Aditya hails from Assam, India, and holds a PhD. in International History (with Minor in Anthropology and Sociology) from the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He was previously a visiting fellow at Princeton University, Institute for Human Studies Vienna and Oxford University.

The project

Blind Spots and Blank Spaces: borderworlds and frontiers at large (1944-1962) : examines the relationships between violence, development and state-making to investigate how ‘remoteness’ is historically produced at the margins of emergent nation-states after global war (WWII) and decolonization.

Hosting institution: FMSH

Selective bibliography

• Limits of Sovereignty: developing blank spaces across Asian borders after the Second World War, in The Oxford Handbook of Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies, ed. Gareth Curless and Martin Thomas (Oxford University Press, Fall 2023)
• Elephant in the Room: countering cultural arguments in food-politics, racism and resistance in contemporary Naga social history, HIMALAYA (May 2023)
• Global wars in a Colonial Frontier, The Routledge Companion to Northeast India edited by T.B. Subba and Jelle J.P. Wouters, Routledge (September 2022)
• Depth of Field: disorienting the ‘ethnographic gaze’ through Zeme Naga realms, Anthropology and Humanism (October 2021 online early view, print edition: Volume 47, Issue 1, June 2022, open access https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12367)
• Guns, Gifts and Guerrillas: knowledge and objects during WW2 in the Indo-Myanmar (Burma) frontier in Manjeet Baruah and Lipokmar Dzüvichü eds. Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia, (Routledge: New York, 2019)