This paper advances the proposition that a dialectical appreciation of the politics of state-institutionalized human rights in colonial and neoliberal hegemonic (imperial) contexts helps to shed light on why Adivasi facing development displacement and dispossession are unlikely to advance their political and existential interests through recourse to an estatized human rights mechanism embedded in global and national political and economic structures imbricated in the historical projects of colonialism and imperialism (globalization of capitalism). Adivasi social movement inspired ‘human rights’ (and related conceptions) informed by an anti-colonial/imperial project that transgress these trajectories continue to provide the primary political impetus for asserting the continued place of Adivasi (see Kapoor, 2011 for an elaboration on such assertions). The paper is informed by funded research into ‘Learning in Adivasi social movements in eastern India’ (2006–2009), the author’s relationship with Adivasi and rural movements/activism in this region since the early 1990s, and secondary literature addressing the politics of human rights in Adivasi contexts of development displacement and dispossession.
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