Armed group taxation and trade: Smuggler perspectives from Northeast India

<jats:p>How does changing armed group taxation during conflict reshape smuggling and trade? This paper follows areca nut, one of northeast India's most heavily smuggled contraband commodities, through the eyes of the traders who move it across the Myanmar–Manipur borderlands. Drawing on interviews with four traders operating at different scales, the paper traces the same commodity across two consecutive conflict transitions–Myanmar's post-coup civil war since 2021 and the Meitei–Kuki violence in Manipur since May 2023–to ask what happens to informal trading arrangements when the political order in which they are embedded fractures. The paper makes two claims. First, conflict consolidates the trade even as it fragments armed control: costs through Myanmar alone have risen sevenfold and journey times have stretched from days to weeks, raising the capital and relationship-building required to move goods, and squeezing out smaller traders while entrenching a handful of well-resourced kingpins. Second, conflict redistributes who profits from passage along ethnic lines, as the collapse of a routinised, multi-ethnic checkpoint architecture around Moreh has opened new routes through Kuki and Naga territories, produced new gatekeepers, and made ethnic identity itself a determinant of logistics. Read together, these trader accounts extend the literature on armed group taxation and war economies beyond its usual focus on how armed groups govern and extract, showing instead how conflict transitions reorganise who can trade, along which paths, and at what cost, even as the trade itself endures.</jats:p>