This seminar will analyse the factors that have led to tribal land alienation in South Asia and how Adivasis’ struggles for autonomy constitute a response to their dispossession, based on a comparative study of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and of the tribal territories of Central India.

Dr Dalel Benbabaali is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. Her current research is on development, conflict and displacement in Central India, and more recently in Bangladesh. Her work focuses on Adivasis, the indigenous communities of South Asia, among whom she has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork.