Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Oliver Walton
(University of Bath)
Jonathan Goodhand (SOAS University of London)
Patrick Meehan (University of Manchester)
- Location:
- Room 11 (Examination Schools)
- Start time:
- 14 September, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how borderland and frontier regions shape the dynamics of statebuilding, contestation and development, and what this means for aid policy and practice. It focuses on questions of politics, power and history, as well as the crucial role played by brokers in borderland contexts.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores how borderland and frontier regions shape the dynamics of statebuilding, contestation and development, and what this means for aid policy and practice. Borderlands and frontiers are classically viewed as exemplars of 'maldevelopment' and exporters of insecurity, terrorism and illegal commodities. Celebratory accounts of a global decline in armed conflict and decreasing levels of poverty, ring hollow in many of today's borderlands in the Global South. Conflict reduction and development policies are simply not working in many of these cases, and may in fact be part of the problem.
This panel critiques existing development theory and policy which has tended to suffer from 'borderland blindness'. While recent political economy and political settlements literature has focused attention on questions to do with conflict, power and resources, this work suffers from 'methodological nationalism', viewing statebuilding as a top down exercise in the diffusion of power outwards from centre to periphery. The panel explores an alternative perspective, viewing development and statebuilding processes from the vantage point of the state margins, drawing attention to the specific dynamics of politics, power and history in these regions. It explores the role played by peripheral elites or brokers in shaping access to power and resources) through mediating across diverse regulatory regimes and political institutions. The panel aims to generate fresh theoretical insights from the comparative analysis of borderland and frontier regions across a range of settings in the Global South.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to understand variations in the dynamics of violent conflict and development at the margins of the state. It looks at how and why market expansion and state consolidation can lead to diverging developmental outcomes in peripheral zones.
Paper long abstract:
Borderland and frontier regions demonstrate vast disparities in their levels of (in)stability, violence, the embeddedness of state institutions and market dynamics. Attempts to account for this unevenness often embrace a 'diffusionist narrative' (Harvey 2006) whereby peripheral regions that continue to experience violence, poverty and illegality are portrayed as residual or marginalized spaces left behind by the uneven diffusion of capitalism and statebuilding. The antidote to such borderland 'pathologies' has been to fashion more 'effective' state institutions and market practices to 'develop' and integrate these regions
This paper presents an alternative conceptualisation; rather than seeing frontiers and borderlands as 'lagging' zones, they are viewed as places of opportunity, laboratories of rapid (and contested) political and economic change. Variation in the political economy of such regions can be explained, less in terms of the degree of political and economical integration - the assumption underpinning official development efforts to 'thin' borders, build infrastructure, create development corridors and so forth - than the different ways in which state practices and market dynamics are imposed, resisted and brokered by states and peripheral elites.
In developing this argument, the paper interrogates how and why processes of political and economic integration result in the formalisation and stabilisation of border practices in some areas while facilitating continued instability in others. It examines who benefits and who loses out from the formalisation and liminality of border regions and the different kinds of political settlements, violence and development outcomes that coalesce around these dynamics.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relative inertia of development agencies to act on evidence-based diagnostics demonstrating that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires spatially targeting development investments in marginalized borderlands.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relative inertia of development agencies to act on evidence-based diagnostics demonstrating that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires spatially targeting development investments in marginalized borderlands. Borderlands may have distinct rural-urban characteristics and are understood to be made up of marginal urban agglomerations and peripheral rural regions straddling international borders. It is widely recognized that in official development assistance (ODA) in these spaces needs multi-sectoral approaches to social and economic development. ODA, whether delivered through bilateral of multilateral channels, stands accused of 'borderland blindness' - an inability to act on a growing body of evidence that converging risks are spatially determining concentration of vulnerable and poor populations in marginal spaces. While the diagnostics of development agencies may not be blind, their agency and ability to target social and economic development interventions to marginal spaces may be bound by the political economy of country-based ODA architectures with ingrained hegemonic center-periphery reflexes. Examples will be drawn from ongoing work in the Horn of Africa
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the political dynamics surrounding state reform and development in the Eastern Province, a frontier region in Sri Lanka. We analyse the role performed by brokers in mediating coercive, political or economic resources, and trace their shifting relations with the state.
Paper long abstract:
Sri Lanka's contested post war transition has centred around the twin processes of state reform and reconstruction. In this paper, we analyse the political dynamics surrounding the Eastern Provincial Council and government-led reconstruction programmes in Sri Lanka's east. Rather than exploring how these efforts may have 'failed' to achieve the goal of conflict resolution, we examine how wider tensions between development, deconcentration and devolution in Sri Lanka have played out in this frontier region.
The paper demonstrates how development and decentralisation processes institutionalise sites of contestation, and create new spaces for the mobilisation of political support or the promotion and articulation of diverse political and economic agendas. We highlight the key role performed by brokers in mediating centre-periphery relations, focusing on how the fortunes of one important frontier broker - the former LTTE commander and later Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan or Pillayan - shifted in response to the wider oscillations of power that characterised the war to peace transition. The case study illustrates the need for studies of statebuilding and development to pay close attention to space and how power is territorialized. It also stresses the importance of carefully studying the role of individual brokers, their career paths and trajectories over time.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers a preliminary framework for better understanding the knock-on effects of policy interventions in urban borderlands. It argues that paired border towns function in tandem through interdependent imbalances that are hinged around the border line.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the usefulness of a 'hinge' metaphor when thinking about pairs of border towns. It presents a preliminary typology of local cross-border asymmetries, sub-divided into categories which are broadly speaking dynamic: street crime and enforcement, informal border regulation, employment rates and external linkages, and those which tend to be more static: penal codes, formal border regulation, infrastructure, demography, physical geography and natural resources. The central argument is that pairs of border towns function in tandem through a series of interdependent imbalances that are hinged around the border line.
These categories of asymmetry each give rise to a range of tangible qualities that differ between pairs of border towns: variations in rates of street crime, in commodity prices, in building quality and so on. The result is that urban spaces paired across borders exhibit a form of organic solidarity in which each side adapts to changes on the other. Visualising asymmetries as being hinged at the border can be used to pose questions about how imbalances change over time, whether particular asymmetries tend towards different equilibriums, and how particular asymmetries relate to one another: the relationship, for example, between imbalances in market regulation and in violent crime in neighbourhoods on either side of a border. This provides a preliminary framework for better understanding the knock-on effects of policy interventions in urban borderlands. Although a range of examples are drawn upon, Goma (DRC) and Gisenyi (Rwanda) are privileged out of the author's familiarity with them.
Paper short abstract:
How does aid to Nepal frame its understanding of the 'borderland' and what are the implications of this? We address the relationship between development assistance to Nepal and political processes that gave rise to a politics of the periphery, focusing on ethnic movements and the Maoist insurgency.
Paper long abstract:
Foreign aid to Nepal has been a fixture of the county's political and development efforts since the 1950s. In this presentation, we draw on the idea of 'borderlands' both as a geographical reality and analytic strategy. Nepal occupies a number of borderlands; it lies on the borders of India and Tibet, and the fringes of greater geopolitical orders in South Asia; and internally there are significant political borderlands, effecting its national politics, from those of the Maoist insurgency, to the Madeshi politics of the Terai in the south, and regionalised ethnic politics. Bilateral aid to Nepal has, through various periods in its history, been complicit in marginalising and consolidating these border arenas with a centralised political regime. This paper approaches this political history of aid to Nepal via the prism of the relationship between internal political changes since 1950, and the shifting parameters of bilateral aid, in particular that of British aid. It explores the way aid actors in Nepal framed their understanding of the borderland and of its implications for their policies and activities. As such, we are interested in exploring the complex and contested ways development assistance to Nepal has been intertwined with processes that gave rise to ethnic movements, the Maoist insurgency and the drive for Madeshi autonomy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the relationship between counterinsurgency and statemaking int he margins of modern India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the politics of statemaking in the margins of modern India. Based on fieldwork in the erstwhile Maoist zones of rural eastern India called the Jungle Mahals, I explore how the state in India employs development as a counterinsurgency measure to wean people away from the Maoist rebels. Rural women, in particular, came to be targeted through the new counterinsurgency policy emanating from Delhi. Through women, the state sought to reach every household in its quest of re-establishing its authority and legitimacy in these conflict zones. I discuss the intertwining of gender, counterinsurgency, and state formation in the present moment, and how what we call the 'state' emerges at this intersection. I situate statemaking in the Jungle Mahals within a longer history of state-society relations in this frontier region. Combining ethnographic and historical methods, this paper will look at the role of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the emergence of the state in the margins of modern India at different junctures in the colonial and postcolonial eras.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses emerging social differentiation in Ethiopia's frontier. Contradicting the conventional wisdom that only the powerful exploits the powerless, some local elites from marginalized Afar people, emerging as powerful by colluding with the national political elites.
Paper long abstract:
The Afar people are one of the most marginalized groups of people in the Horn of Africa (HoA) (Dereje, 2011). Politically they are fragmented into three countries -- Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea -- and economically successive governments and more powerful neighbors have appropriated their riverine lands. The Afar people inhabit, one of the most arid and harsh environments, described usually as inhospitable. They live in the frontier regions of the three countries. Contradicting the conventional wisdom that only the powerful exploits the powerless (James Scott, 1990), somelocal elites from the marginalized Afar people in the Ethiopia's frontier, emerging as powerful by colluding with the national political elites. This paper is an output of an ethnographic fieldwork in salt mining business in Eli Dar District, in Afar Region of Ethiopia.
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the strategical appropriation of humanitarian resources by a group of Burmese immigrants living in a garbage dump in Mae Sot (Northern Thailand). It aims to reflect on the concept of “development” used by aid workers and its differences with that of beneficiaries of interventions.
Paper long abstract:
Being located closely to the Thai-Myanmar border, the dump has been a place of shelter and settlement of about four hundred Burmese immigrants since the late 1980s. The garbage dump is mostly regarded as a highly marginalized space because of its location and living conditions, and over the years has attracted several NGOs and humanitarian organisations. The governance those agencies exert can be conceived (Pandolfi, 2003) as a new form of sovereignty at the intersection of "biopolitics" (Foucault, 2004) and "bare life" (Agamben, 1995), beyond the authority of Thai nation-state. Aid interventions are different in perspectives, approaches and methods but, at the same time, they tend to share the concept of the dump as a peripheral and "needy" place. Humanitarianism strategically employs such a representation to attract financial and political resources, within the framework of an"ethos of compassion" (Fassin, 2007). However, even when aid programs are well-orientated, most fail, including "participatory" ones.
On the other hand, dump dwellers are able to strategically appropriate aid resources. Also, the benefits of a de facto suspension of Thai law enforcement has pushed them to become mostly sedentary. The apparently undesirable "suspended condition" they live within allows them to avoid persecutions and life struggles from Myanmar, and at the same time to protect themselves from Thai immigration policies.