The violence that erupted in Manipur in May 2023 has primarily been explained as an ethnic confrontation between the valley-based Meitei community and the hill-based Kuki-Zo community. Debate has focused on issues such as Scheduled Tribe status, land rights, constitutional protections and the long-standing hill-valley divide. Although these factors are undeniably important, reducing the crisis to ethnic antagonism obscures the broader political economy within which the conflict has unfolded. Ethnic explanations privilege questions of identity while pushing material and territorial interests into the background. Yet the conflict is equally about control over a frontier through which one of South Asia’s most lucrative illicit commodity networks passes. Manipur’s hills are not merely contested ethnic homelands; they constitute the western corridor of the Golden Triangle narcotics economy. Consequently, any explanation of the present crisis that neglects the drug economy remains incomplete.
Manipur and the Golden Triangle
The Golden Triangle, comprising Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, has long occupied a central place in global heroin production (McCoy and Read 1972). While scholarship has examined production centres in Myanmar’s Shan State, less attention has been paid to the western trafficking routes entering India through Manipur. Sharing a 398-kilometre border with Myanmar, Manipur consists of mountainous terrain that was historically administered as a frontier territory under indirect colonial rule. Communities such as the Kuki-Zo, Naga and Chin have maintained kinship, trade and mobility across this border for generations. These social networks, combined with difficult terrain and limited state penetration, create favourable conditions for illicit cross-border circulation.
The 2021 military coup in Myanmar significantly altered this political economy. The weakening of state authority encouraged both increased opium cultivation and the rapid expansion of synthetic drug production. As conflict intensified within Myanmar, production and trafficking increasingly shifted towards Chin State, bordering Manipur. The result was a greater volume of narcotics moving through Manipur’s hill districts, substantially raising the economic and political value of territorial control. Although the drug economy did not directly cause the violence, it transformed the incentives surrounding land, governance and security. Borderlands are characterised by fragmented sovereignty rather than uniform state control. Authority is continually negotiated among governments, armed organisations and local institutions. The India-Myanmar border exemplifies such conditions, where everyday mobility simultaneously sustains legitimate commerce and illicit trafficking. Manipur’s strategic location, therefore, constitutes a defining feature of its contemporary political economy.
Poppy, Livelihoods and Territorial Politics
Poppy cultivation is one of the least-examined dimensions of the Manipur crisis. Kipgen (2019) notes that the expansion of cultivation has coincided with declining returns from shifting cultivation, limited employment opportunities and persistent developmental neglect in the hill districts. For many households, poppy functions less as a criminal enterprise than as a livelihood strategy in regions where formal economic alternatives remain scarce. Its economic attractiveness is considerable. Requiring relatively low investment while generating high returns, poppy has become what may be described as a frontier crop, flourishing where developmental interventions remain weak. The crop therefore reflects structural marginalisation rather than merely criminal intent.
However, poppy cultivation is simultaneously a territorial practice. Since cultivation often involves forested land, it has come into direct conflict with conservation policies, forest demarcation and government eviction drives. Official eradication campaigns have destroyed substantial acreage, yet cultivation persists because its underlying economic incentives remain unchanged. Government efforts to classify settlements as illegal forest encroachments have further politicised anti-narcotics campaigns. Many hill communities perceive these interventions not simply as law enforcement but as attempts to undermine customary land rights and facilitate greater state control over contested territory. Consequently, anti-poppy operations have become intertwined with broader struggles over sovereignty and belonging. The immediate tensions preceding the violence of 2023 cannot be separated from these disputes over forests, land ownership and territorial authority. State sovereignty in Manipur is ‘fragmented and contested’ (Hansen and Stepputat, 2006). While the valley exhibits relatively dense institutional presence through bureaucracy, policing and markets, governance in the hills operates through a combination of security forces, Suspension of Operations arrangements, customary institutions and armed organisations. Rather than existing outside state authority, the narcotics economy has become one mechanism through which these overlapping forms of authority are negotiated.
Narco-Frontier: A Theoretical Intervention
Existing scholarship (Li, 2014; Scott, 2009; Das and Poole, 2004) increasingly conceptualises frontiers not as empty peripheral spaces but as sites where state authority is continually produced through governance, violence and economic intervention. Building on this literature, the concept of the narco-frontier highlights the constitutive role played by illicit commodity chains in shaping frontier politics.
Characterised by layered sovereignty, productive illegality, criminalised identities, and contested legibility, the region can be theorised as a narco-frontier. It is where state institutions coexist with armed organisations, customary authorities and informal networks exercising overlapping forms of regulation. Rather than existing outside development, illicit economies generate employment, investment and local revenue where formal economies remain weak. Communities associated with narcotics cultivation become collectively stigmatised, making ethnicity and criminality increasingly difficult to separate in public discourse and state policy. And finally, distinctions between legality and illegality are themselves politically negotiated. The state’s ability to define what is legal becomes an exercise of sovereign power rather than merely an administrative classification.
Manipur’s hill districts exhibit all four characteristics. Multiple actors, including security forces, insurgent organisations, village authorities, and church institutions, exercise authority within the same territorial space. Their relationships involve negotiation, accommodation and occasional violence. Within this environment, narcotics become not simply an illegal commodity but a medium through which political authority is organised and contested. The narco-frontier differs from concepts such as the shadow state (Reno 1995), war economy (Keen 1998) or narco-state (Chabal and Green 2016) because it does not treat illicit economies as deviations from normal state formation. Instead, it views them as constitutive elements of governance in marginal frontier regions. Under conditions of uneven development, weak institutional penetration and persistent conflict, illicit economies become integrated into everyday political life. Durable conflict resolution therefore requires structural economic transformation rather than the expansion of coercive enforcement alone. This framework also reveals the intimate relationship between identity and legality. The designation of poppy cultivation as illegal simultaneously identifies criminal actors, defines territorial boundaries and legitimises particular forms of state intervention. For affected communities, resistance to anti-narcotics campaigns frequently reflects concerns over indigenous rights and customary land ownership rather than support for narcotics production. The debate is therefore less about drugs themselves than about who possesses the authority to govern frontier territory.
Conclusion
Viewing Manipur through the lens of the narco-frontier broadens existing explanations of the crisis. Ethnic antagonism remains central, but it is embedded within a wider political economy shaped by illicit commodity flows, uneven development, contested sovereignty and competing territorial claims. This perspective carries important implications. First, the state cannot be treated solely as a neutral mediator because anti-narcotics campaigns and forest governance have themselves become part of the conflict’s political dynamics. Second, conflict resolution must incorporate the drug economy by creating viable livelihood alternatives before intensifying enforcement measures. Criminalising economically vulnerable cultivators without addressing structural marginalisation is unlikely to produce lasting peace. Further, territorial governance in Manipur requires a more meaningful accommodation of customary land rights and indigenous authority. Policies that rely primarily on criminalisation risk deepening rather than resolving frontier tensions. The concept of the narco-frontier proposed here is not intended to replace ethnic interpretations of the Manipur crisis but to complement them. It demonstrates that identity politics, territorial sovereignty and illicit political economies are mutually constitutive. Understanding the conflict, therefore, requires recognising that the geography of narcotics is simultaneously a geography of land, belonging and political authority.
References
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Kipgen, Ngamjahao (2019): “Why Are Farmers in Manipur Cultivating Poppy?,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol 54, No 46, 23 November.
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