Conflicts, Activism and Women Leadership in Manipur, and Northeast India  ​​​​​​​

Director’s Conversations Series, Fall 2020 

Speaker: Binalakshmi Nepram, Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Founder-Director, Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network and the Control Arms Foundation of India; Co-founder of the Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice and Peace 

Discussant: James Robson, James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Victor and William Fung Director, Harvard University Asia Center; Chair, Regional Studies East Asia, Harvard University  

Produced by the Harvard University Asia Center

Binalakshmi “Bina” Nepram is an indigenous scholar and a woman human rights defender, whose work focuses on deepening democracy and championing women-led peace, security, and disarmament in Manipur, Northeast India, and South Asia. She is the founder of three organizations: the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, the Control Arms Foundation of India, and the Global Alliance of Indigenous Peoples, Gender Justice, and Peace. In 2010 Bina also initiated the Northeast India Women Initiative for Peace to ensure that indigenous women in Northeast India are included in peace talks and peace processes. Bina has authored and edited five books, including Deepening Democracy, Diversity, and Women’s Rights in India (2019), Where Are Our Women in Decision Making? (2016), Meckley: A Historical Fiction on Manipur (2004) and South Asia’s Fractured Frontier (2002). Her work has garnered international recognition, including the Anna Politskovskaya Award (2018), Women have Wings Award (2016), CNN IBN Real Heroes Award (2011), Ashoka Social Innovators Fellowship (2011), the Sean MacBride Peace Prize (2010), and the Dalai Lama Foundation's WISCOMP Scholar of Peace Award (2008). 

In 2013, the U.K.-based Action on Armed Violence named her one of “100 most influential people in the world working in armed violence reduction.” Forbes (India) had listed Bina as one of 25 young minds in India that matter in 2015 

Ms. Nepram served as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2017–2018 and later was IIE-SRF Visiting Scholar at Connecticut College in 2018–2019 where she designed and taught a course based on 15 years of her activism on "Women, War and Peace". Bina also was a Reagan Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Spring 2020 where she worked on deepening democracy and ensuring rule of law and gender justice in Northeast India. 

She is a board member of the International Peace Bureau, the 1910 Nobel Peace Laureate. Bina has represented her community at several meetings at the United Nations in Geneva and New York City where she works and engages with global multilateral bodies to bring peace and justice in her home state Manipur and Northeast India, a part of India that is home to the longest-running armed conflict and subjected to a martial law since 1958. Bina is strongly committed to issues of peace, justice, disarmament, and ensuring a racial and gender-just world. Peace for her is hard work every single day.

More of Bina's work at www.binalakshminepram.com & Twitter @BinaNepram 

James Robson is the James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the William Fung Director of the Harvard University Asia Center. He is also the Chair of the Regional Studies East Asia M.A. program. Robson received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002, after spending many years researching in China, Taiwan, and Japan. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, and Chan/Zen Buddhism. He has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres and the 2010 ToshihideNumata Book Prize in Buddhism. Robson is also the author of "Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism" (History of Religions 48:2), "Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia" (PMLA, 2010), and "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian." His current research includes a long-term project on the history of the confluence of Buddhist monasteries and mental hospitals in East Asia.

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