Description
The Indo–Nepal border, often characterized as an “open border,” constitutes a complex socio-political and cultural frontier where overlapping structures of power shape women’s lives. This paper examines the gendered dimensions of borderland marginalities, interrogating how conflict, culture, and patriarchy intersect to regulate women’s everyday experiences. While the open border facilitates mobility, kinship, and trade, it simultaneously embeds women within asymmetrical regimes of surveillance, informality, and patriarchal control as such disproportionate burden, producing forms of marginalization that remain underexplored.
The India-Nepal Border has historically been an open border governed by 1950 ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship’ facilitating the extensive cross-border movement of kinship, marriage, trade and labor migration. However, the porous nature of the border places women in a vulnerable position, exposing them to the risk of trafficking, exploitation and socio-economic marginalization. This paper foregrounds how cross-border kinship and cultural ties coexist with systemic constraints imposed by patriarchal control and conflict-induced insecurities.
The study will use a qualitative research approach and an empirical framework, concentrating on instances from the Indo-Nepal Terai region. Data will be generated from interviews, extensive field research and participatory mapping with women in cross-border movement.
Analytically, the paper draws upon an intersectional feminist approach, integrating insights from feminist borderland studies, decolonial perspectives, and subaltern scholarship. The study will underscore how socially constructed hierarchies intersect with state-led border regimes, producing different vulnerabilities and constraints. The study will promote a critical rethinking of border studies in South Asia by placing women at the center of research, highlighting the necessity of gender-sensitive scholarship from the Global South.
