Resilience in Transition: A Perspective

This perspective on the theme Resilience in Transition was presented at the 31st General Conference of the Naga Students’ Federation on August 29, 2025, at the RSA Ground, Tseminyu

Aküm Longchari

First Words
Good morning! Respected Madam Chairperson, I will begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands upon which we have gathered here today. I offer my respect to the ancestors and elders – past, present, and emerging – for their resilience and fortitude in the quest for justice, healing, and peace. And I acknowledge the significance of having this conversation about peoplehood and its resilience, on Indigenous lands in the spirit of wholeness.

I also acknowledge and offer my respect to the leaders – past, present and emerging – of the Naga Students’ Federation (NSF). Established in1947, the NSF has been an unwavering and steadfast voice of the Naga people. Thank you for facilitating this space, over the last few days, to have a robust process of cultivating and nurturing cultural engagement. And I am grateful to the organising team for giving me this opportunity to share a perspective on Resilience in Transition. In fact, allow me to say, NSF’s 78-year journey through challenges and opportunities is a prime example of resilience, demonstrating that it is a process over time and space across generations. The NSF experience tells us that it is always in transition and never in a state of permanency.

And to the Special Guest, Deputy Speaker of the Nagaland Legislative Assembly and to this dignified gathering I extend warm greetings to each one of you. I recognise the wealth of wisdom, knowledge, and experience present in this assembly of leaders, church workers, scholars, thinkers, practitioners, the media fraternity, and the young men and women who are tomorrow’s leaders. It is your presence that provides meaning and relevance as we draw insights together on how to navigate the transitions of our time with clarity, vision, courage, and conviction. Without you, this General Conference would be of little consequence.

I must confess that the NSF has entrusted me with a rather daunting and difficult task of sharing a perspective on Resilience in Transition, a profound theme, which requires in-depth reflection at a time when you are celebrating and sharing your diverse lived experiences. 

Hence, in the spirit of co-learning, let us with openness engage the contradictions, turbulences, and possibilities of our present times. This may help us to look at the world differently, to think and move together, and to imagine anew a shared language of solidarity with resilience, humility and new knowledge. I seek your patient and deep listening.

A Word on Resilience
Resilience and Transition are two separate concepts, each with its own merit. It is humbling to try and explore their interplay in the context of our history, geography, and politics.

For some time now, Indigenous Peoples have been noting that the word Resilience is being overused, especially in the context of development and humanitarian programs which seek to promote a definition without really engaging with the core issues surrounding questions of power and injustice. Therefore, it is essential for us to be mindful of the need to define and centre our understanding and approaches to Resilience by locating it within the historical struggles for justice and the cultural contexts of our knowledge systems and creativity. 

The NSF seems to have intuitively understood that resilience is more than just ‘bouncing back. ‘It is about human dignity with the capacity to attain a more wholistic destiny. The NSF in their theme concept note, expresses hope that “this conference should not just be a gathering, but a turning point to rebuild trust, to shape a future worthy of our dreams, and to navigate this transition together, with courage and conviction.” It is with this optimism that I engage with Resilience in Transition.

For some reason, our lived experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, its consequences and our own challenges with resilience kept coming to mind while I was preparing this reflection. A few weeks ago, a friend who was a frontline worker during the lockdown in Nagaland, reminded me that the COVID experience was life changing, provocative, and a testament of human resilience. 

The frontline worker said that lessons from the pandemic inform us that building resilience takes time, courage and strength as one adapts and adjusts to the personal, relational, structural and cultural changes caused by it. In an ironic way the lockdowns demonstrated the human capability to nurture resilience, to be steadfast, innovative, imaginative and creative, and by being flexible and dynamic to adapt to the situation. Resilience is not something that is stagnant or fixed, but something that can be cultivated. It is both the process and outcome, a means as well as an end. 

Remember how the COVID pandemic induced a condition of uncertainty – intense panic, fear, confusion, isolation, distrust, suspicion, anger, rumours and death. All of which was further compromised by a state machinery constrained by weak infrastructure and limited resources. Eventually communities were provoked to look inwards to recover basic human values and work together in cooperation and shared responsibility to find local solutions. The spirit of unity, gratitude, sharing, generosity, compassion, acceptance, dignity, justice and forgiveness, to name a few, helped us all live through those trying times. This was an example of communities practicing resilience in action.

I refer to the COVID pandemic because it is the shared experience for every one of us here. It is a reminder that we all benefited from acts of resilience, which in turn nurtured resilience in each other. But more essentially, can this conference channel the spirit of resilience, as we grapple with the challenges and opportunities in our current transitions?

Most of us in this gathering will agree when NSF says, “Resilience, therefore, must mean more than endurance. It must mean standing firm in our values, resisting complacency, and rising with purpose.” So, how do we arrive together on a common ground of shared understanding to constructively engage with everyday reality, and incrementally nurturing a shared responsibility in creating a future that reflects our aspirations?

Contextualising Transitions
Can we approach this together as an opportunity to step out of our entrenched positions, reflect and process together about how to restore broken relationships? The intention is not to dwell on our existential realities or indulge in our chosen traumas and glories, but to tap into our common yearning for dignity, justice, healing and peace by engaging in critical imagination.
We live in an interesting age where technology and communication have revolutionized human interaction. It has conditioned our behaviour and our responses, while also enabling more and more people to be interconnected and interdependent in such an intimate way that it is profoundly affecting and impacting all of us.

And yet, despite the increasing interdependency, there are paradoxes. Currently, humanity across all cultures, nations, and countries is facing polarization and unprecedented challenges like never before in human history. Within my own lifetime, many shifts have been experienced at the macro level. For instance, in 1991 the world began to transition from the Cold War with a bi-polar world to a brief uni-polar world, and then a multilateral world dominated by various middle-level powers, each different from the other and yet each seeking to assert and establish their own spheres of influence. And currently, we are living with tensions between the uni-polar and the multilateral world.

The symbolic end of the Cold War opened the space for optimism with the expectation that the world would transition from a Cold War to Hot Peace. This had a direct impact on the Nagas and the North East region as the Government of India launched its ‘Look East Policy’ in 1991, as a geostrategic horizontal initiative to cultivate extensive relationships with the Asia-Pacific Region. This later progressed to the Act East Policy in 2014. With the North East being defined as the ‘gateway’ to the East, India’s need to address the unresolved political crisis in this region was paramount. It was through this lens that peace processes were initiated at the end of the last century, including the one with the Nagas.

Since 1997, some vital lessons have been gleaned. The history of this region informs us that the road to peace is often dirty, messy, and uncertain. It is never straightforward, nor should they be. Yet, a State-centered template to peace process has generally been a band aid approach inherently designed to bureaucratically manage the conflict and the parties. This means it is more about enforcing order, and less about peace. A template that is intended to only end the physical violence without addressing the core political issues of why it occurred in the first place will have limited success because it covers up deep wounds. Hence, many a times the template’s limitation fails in establishing enduring peace despite good intentions, complementary relationships between parties, and so on.

Nonetheless, the peace process has broadened the democratic space for Nagas of all generations to experience forms of relative peace. During this time, entrepreneurship is evolving, the arts and the music is flourishing, tourism is incrementally taking form, mobility has increased, and local capacity building is being fostered. More importantly, it is offering the much-needed historical opportunity for Nagas to think together and find ways of healing, reconciliation, and envisioning a shared future of possibilities. In this way, the Naga engagement with the world is constantly evolving with growing awareness, connections and interactions.

Simultaneously, the market forces of globalisation and the 21st century notion of individualism have entered Naga life and culture. As new narratives emerge, the Naga identity is being directly impacted through increasing assimilation, greed and selfishness, consumerism and materialism, a widening economic divide, state-centred development, systemic corruption, changing demography, social fragmentation and cultural shifts. We need to ask, where is the idea of the common good located in these shifts?

These changing power dynamics and transitional politics, require us to be acutely aware about who is defining the narratives and for what purposes. This is crucial because currently Nagas are finding ourselves with no new stories that persuade new imaginations essential for nurturing and uplifting ourselves and emerging leaders with new visions and a shared future. As a result, the conforming and complacent status quo is further entrenched as the crisis is being played out through the interplay of our history, politics and geography. This is just the tip of the iceberg. 

NSF’s observation that “Our transition is not just political; it is generational [where] our youth face mounting uncertainties,” is a fact. But the transitions are not occurring in a vacuum. I am reminded of John Brown Childs, an Indigenous elder and thinker, who in 2003 wrote that, “a major problem of the 21st century will be the crisis of diverse” where “more and more people will seek refuge in compartmentalised forms of social identity.” 

Childs, however, says, “the search for safety in such sealed compartments is by itself largely illusory. Fragmented, isolated, and unknowing of, or hostile to, one another, people are more, not less vulnerable” (Childs, 2003, p.7). He asserts that, “The real dilemma we face is the lack of constructive and mutually respectful interaction among diverse settings, rather than diversity itself” (Childs, 2003, p. 7). This lack of dialogue combined with fragmentation, undermines the people’s collaborative resistance to injustice and indignity. 

Fragmentation and polarisation tend to push us towards further divisive ways where we only talk with people who agree with us – like echo chambers. And while we talk about people we do not agree with, it is rare that we talk with them. Today, it is easier to reinforce uncertainties and widen differences rather than reconnect and rebuild relationships that strengthen peaceful coexistence where wholeness and harmony prosper. 

Friends, doesn’t this sound familiar? Is it wrong to say that today’s Nagas find ourselves in this crisis of diverse? We have turned our land into caged compartments. We, then, wonder why we are not happy and don’t feel free, and we ask why we are not united. A caged mind does not trust, it is suspicious and thrives on fear, pride, and self-interest. With time the caged mind becomes assimilated and loses its primordial identity. This prompts Kent Nerburn to describe this condition as being neither a Wolf nor Dog. 

Hence, we Nagas need to objectively reflect on whether the directions of the transitions taking place in the Naga context is of our own making or is it being defined by others? Are we the subjects or objects of this transition process?

In lieu of a conclusion: 
The Interplay of Resilience and Transition
The process of transition is not permanent, nor static, rather it occurs in cycles. Allow me to share a widely used illustration which encapsulates the dynamics of transition in the context of social change: the first generation creates, the second generation motivates, the third generation speculates, and the fourth generation dissipates. Then the cycle repeats itself creating the new. 

However, in the present Naga situation, we seem to be stuck between the third and fourth generations of speculation and dissipation, unable to move forward to create the new. The problem is we have been stuck here for quite some time. The longer we stay in the interregnum between dissipation and creating the new, more unhealthy symptoms will appear. This will further deepen the crisis, preventing the new to be born.

Even as the old is dissipating, we need to ask why the new is not being born. I don’t think there is a lack of capacity and imagination to create anew. However, usually, people in protracted crisis situations are often too focused on dealing with immediate problems and are stuck in entrenched positions with long-held grievances, bitterness, and hurts. Therefore, to transition towards creating the new, we need to intentionally begin creatively imagining, pursuing, and living with Radical Hope (Lear, 2006, p. 4). This means taking a step back from reactive confrontation, recognizing what is taking place in the present moment, taking lessons from that to envision what a peaceful and dignified future would look like. And then, think through potential pathways to get there. It requires initiating a resilient process of futures thinking.

A Naga professor of philosophy says that being resilient is to creatively imagine, hope, adapt, and rebuild in the midst of political uncertainties, shifting economic landscapes, cultural changes, and institutional challenges. This resilience, the professor says, is not about survival but a path to liberation by expressing the language of endurance rooted in community strength with the faith and the will to shape a better future.

With this in mind and as a way of staying in dialogue and nurturing critical consciousness, let us reflect on some forms of interventions which we can pursue at both the individual and collective levels:

1.    Using a decolonizing lens to emancipate the self. This will positively influence the process of transition by deciding to stop being a victim, ending the politics of victimhood, and healing ourselves from being addicted to the pains of the past. The emancipating Naga mind is vital towards finding new ways to understanding ourselves and each other. We can do this by applying a decolonising lens to understanding our history, politics and geography, defining our own narratives, and writing new stories from a Naga perspective. And then, through a praxis of action and reflection encourage critical and innovative thinking that questions: What the health of the Naga society is? What are the social dynamics? What has changed in our relationships? With a sense of accountability and transparency we need to stay with these conversations even when they get rough and difficult.

2.    Nurturing Naga knowledge systems. Historically, the production of colonial knowledge was central in laying the foundation to negate, misrepresent and commodify all aspect of Indigenous life. Every aspect of Indigenous life – including the self – was appropriated during the colonial project. Hence, the recovery, restoration and refining of Naga Indigenous knowledge systems is a fundamental ground-up process to confront the violence of knowledge. This process requires us to unlearn and relearn so that the nurturing of Naga knowledge systems will support cultural resilience which is essential for creating a shared common vision by forging genuine value-based solidarity and cooperation among Nagas. 

3.    Healing the burdens of our past. Nagas need to honestly begin asking ourselves, how have I, or my community, contributed to the crisis. This requires creating safe spaces for self-reflection and truth-telling where individuals and communities can acknowledge where hurts have been committed, demonstrate accountability with the courage to seek forgiveness and extend forgiveness. Human experience has shown us that when truth is spoken offensively, it is received defensively. Thus, for truth to heal, it needs to be spoken respectfully and diplomatically in love to kindle a healing solidarity by rehumanizing each other. Can we work in creating the space for Truth, Justice, Mercy and Forgiveness, and Peace to come together in one place for healing and reconciliation to be a lived reality?

4.    Using a Ground-up Approach to JustPeace and Rebuilding. Nagas want sustainable and enduring JustPeace. Our situation needs a holistic and liberative paradigm where long-term enduring peace is pursued through the lens of justice using a methodology of reconciliation. This will be possible when each of us has the opportunity to be involved at the grassroots level, a place where our voices are heard and we have ownership of the process. The paradigm needs to move towards an intercultural, embracing, engaging, trusting, ethical and respectful process of conflict transformation that seeks to democratise peace between people who do not always agree about everything. This requires a long-term commitment based on statesmanship, humility, sincerity and tenacity to build bridges, to mend broken relationships, to collaborate and agree on a strategic plan that connects with the vision of a shared humanity which involves rebuilding from the ground up our communities and nationhood with values of human dignity and self-determination.

5.    Developing democratic institutions having historical, political, and geographical relevance. In this process of transition, it becomes essential to look at the Naga situation from a structural perspective. Given the history, geography, and politics of Nagaland State, it has since inception embedded in patrimonial rule. This is a structure of governance centred around one strong individual rather than guided by principles of equality, inclusiveness and participation through democratic institutions, rules and norms. And so, all these decades, while Nagaland State may have had the outward appearance of a structured modern state, in reality it has been dominated by political elites, at various levels of society, based on patronage, kinship ties and personal loyalty. As a result, issues of systemic corruption are common symptoms of a system that is inherently weak in principles of transparency, accountability and substantive justice. Therefore, an organic process of developing participatory democracy and strengthening institutions of historical, political, and geographical relevance is crucial. This goes to the heart of self-governance which is centred on people and improving their quality of life. Attaining this will ensure that Nagas are no longer spectators but become co-creators by taking ownership of the process and becoming involved in decision making processes that affect their futures.

My dear friends, I urge you to reflect on these forms of interventions. I feel they are relevant to our present and future wellbeing – becoming whole – as we explore ways to transition from a state of dissipation to creating the new. 

In doing so, it is essential we rise above party politics, factionalism and tribalism. It will require a certain amount of resilience and prudence with the willingness, courage and intention to even take a small step. Transformation begins when we build relationships of mutual trust and respect, where the web of relationships also includes those who you do not agree with. It is about seeking to understand those who don’t understand us. Today I want to make a request: In the midst of our crisis and isms, one practical step we can start with is: Can we begin by stopping the habit of listening with our eyes? Listening with our eyes means when we first look at who is saying something and which tribe or group or faction, he or she is associated with in order to decide what that person is saying and whether to agree or not. Rather, with openness, let us practice active listening so that it will help us to stand for what is right, not who is right!

In conclusion, this 31st General Conference of the Naga Students’ Federation must be about mobilising imagination to set into motion the resilience shaped by this gathering of Naga men and women. From this moment onward, let us agree to focus and invest our energies in overcoming the legacies of injustice, recovering our abilities to be makers of our own culture and exercising our self-determining capacities to unlock a constructive process of creating the new.