Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the role of borderland and frontier regions in Nepal and Sri Lanka's post-war peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. It compares post-war politics and development processes in the two countries focusing on centre-periphery dynamics, and new forms of claim-making..

Paper long abstract:

Much of the writing on conflict and post war transitions in South Asia suffers from methodological nationalism. The state is taken as a given and there is an implicit assumption that post-war statebuilding and development involves the rebuilding of institutions at the centre, followed by the diffusion of power outwards towards the margins of the state. Such a perspective misses the constitutive role that frontier and borderland regions play in shaping power relations and authority at the putative centre.

This paper focuses on the role of borderland and frontier regions in Nepal and Sri Lanka's post-war peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. It draws on emerging findings from a 2-year research project ('Borderlands, Brokers and Peacebuilding in Nepal and Sri Lanka') and compares post-war politics and development processes in the two countries focusing on centre-periphery dynamics. It examines how a variety of political actors operating in these peripheral zones (Tamil nationalist and Muslim parties in Eastern Sri Lanka, Madhesi parties in the Tarai region of Southern Nepal) have navigated the complex and opaque post-war political landscape and negotiated shifting patronage networks. In examining the new forms of claim-making that are emerging from the peripheries, the paper stresses the importance of political brokers, who have been neglected in existing studies but play a key role in balancing demands from communities at the margins with the need forge alliances with and extract resources from political actors at the centre.

Paper short abstract:

This paper, based on field work from a two year research project tells the story of Hambanthota, and in so doing complicates the idea that post-war peacebuilding involves the diffusion of power and resources outwards from centre to periphery.

Paper long abstract:

Central to the processes of securitized post-war development and statebuilding was the construction of a parallel centre in Hambanthota. The area became a major "theatre" of large-scale infrastructural investment, and of new and different constellations of power, as it was central to the reterritorialization agenda of the Rajapakse government.

This paper, based on field work from a two year research project entitled 'Borderlands, brokers and pecebuilding', tells the story of Hambanthota, and in so doing complicates the idea that post-war peacebuilding involves the diffusion of power and resources outwards from centre to periphery. Hambanthota, a new hub, with great political and economic salience, representing however, a vastly different constituency to the cosmopolitan elite of Colombo, emerged from a peripheral region. The making of a centre in Hambanthota helps explore the dynamic and uneven nature of post-war territorialisation, and the emergence of 'central peripheries' that simultaneously constitute and de-legitimise power at the centre.

Though the 'entity' that is Hambanthota became a hub of post-war statebuilding vis-à-vis development, there are inherent tensions between processes of state territorialisation and infusions of capital and investment, especially as the financial support for the transformation of Hambanthota from an impoverished agricultural area into an economic and political powerhouse came from China. The construction of Hambanthota as a parallel centre leads us to explore how the 'centre' in Colombo and the extra-territorial centre works to make Hambanthota ('the other') legible and knowable, and how the 'centre' is re-made in the process.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon fieldwork from a two year research project this paper examines Nepal's post war transition focusing on shifting centre-periphery relations, with particular reference to a provincial town, Rajbiraj in the southern Tarai borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing upon fieldwork from a two year research project entitled 'Borderlands, brokers and peacebuilding' this paper examines Nepal's post war transition focusing on shifting centre-periphery relations, with particular reference to a provincial town, Rajbiraj in the southern Tarai borderlands. The paper aims to develop a 'borderland biography', as this provides an interesting lens and vantage point for exploring key debates about sovereignty, power sharing and state legitimacy, that rose to the fore during Nepal's conflict and have continued, sometimes violently, during the post war period. By doing so it eschews simplistic temporal divisions between pre-war, war-time and post war.

The biography of Rajbiraj seeks to explore in detail, shifting centre-periphery power relations in the post war period, as the town and wider region, became a centre of political mobilisation for the Madeshi movement. It examines, through life history material, the role of political brokers in Rajbiraj. It shows both the subnational and transnational dynamics of political mobilisation and claim making, and it also seeks to highlight the ambiguity of brokers -they simultaneously extend and place limits on sovereign power; they manage and mediate conflict, but engage in violent mobilisation; they are both the purveyors of patronage, and advocates for radical political projects. These borderland brokers operate in an ecology of constraint and opportunity, and they provide an important lens for exploring the state 'at its limits'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes formalized patterns of political settlement bargaining identified from sub-state peace agreements pertaining to the conflicts in Nepal, the Philippines, Sudan and Yemen, thus, providing a contrast to the common research focus on national level political settlement bargaining.

Paper long abstract:

Following in the footsteps of international peace mediation, research commonly focuses on how peace is brokered at the level of the national political settlement. This contrasts with a growing empirical richness of peace agreements brokered at a sub-national level that aim at settling conflicts often at the margins of the respective nation state. However, what are the ingredients for peace in sub-state conflicts? While we may assume that these ingredients, along with the negotiation process and the involved stakeholders follow different patterns compared to the national level, we know little about what the particulars in sub-national agreements actually look like. Against the background of the new PA-X Peace Agreement Database, which encompasses approximately 1500 written peace agreements from 1990 to the present day, this paper engages with four conflicts that have a particularly strong record of sub-state agreements: Nepal, the Philippines, Sudan and Yemen. Based on a content analysis of available sub-national peace agreements from these four contexts, the paper will identify and describe the formalised patterns of political settlement bargaining at the margins.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the post-war transition in northern Uganda has been secured in part through a strategy of unpredictable and often harsh state interventions that renders the regime ever-present in citizens' imaginations while undermining societal political organization.

Paper long abstract:

This article presents a new theory of governance to account for political stability in seemingly weak or fragile states. The article is based on eight months of qualitative research in northern Uganda, which experienced civil war from 1986-2006. It argues that the enduring power of Uganda's ruling regime, as experienced in the conflict-affected north of the country, relies on "institutionalized arbitrariness"—a system in which the ruling regime unpredictably claims and denies its authority to intervene in matters of concern to civilians (from domestic disputes to theft to murder), and backs these unpredictable assertions and denials by meaningful threat of overwhelming force. In turn, this atomizes society and undermines societal political organization. Institutionalized arbitrariness is made possible by four factors: the perception of state control of sovereign violence, shifting and fluid state jurisdiction, the perception of potential state presence, and non-hierarchical and fragmented security and governance institutions. Together, these four factors produce an environment of seemingly arbitrary violence that makes the government ever-present in civilian imagination, while the regime avoids the costs associated with direct rule and the principal-agent problems associated with indirect rule. Thus, institutionalized arbitrariness reflects an efficient and effective mode of contemporary governance in Uganda's post-conflict borderlands.

Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at how sub-national unsettlement and conflict in the Somali Region of Ethiopia exists alongside efforts to consolidate Ethiopia's federal project. It highlights how different elite bargains within the region, across borders, and between centre and periphery contribute to this.

Paper long abstract:

The focus on centralised elite bargains in discussions of statebuilding, political settlements and post-war transition often overlooks the multi-layered bargaining that shapes sub-national settlements. A deeper look at the ongoing consolidation of Ethiopia's transition since the 1991 overthrow of the Derg government, reveals distinct political unsettlement at its margins. The Somali Regional State (SRS) of Ethiopia (also known as Ogaden region) has experienced ongoing insurgent conflict alongside increased administrative decentralisation, increased fiscal transfers and regional development programmes, and the growth of local governance structures under successive regional executives, which have been largely maintained and restrained by the federal government and its agencies.

The paper brings together research conducted in the region with practitioner peacebuilding experience to illustrate the spatial variation in transition processes where unsettlement and aspects of conflict, contestation and violence continue in Ethiopia's margins. In the case of the SRS, such dynamics are shaped by political bargains and priorities at the centre as well as the way in which both the centre and margin engage with regional Somali forces. The paper importantly traces the emergence of a regional presidency in 2010 which, demonstrating an unprecedented level of executive power and autonomy from Addis Ababa, has shifted centre-periphery relations from dependence to increasing symbiosis and elasticity. The paper concludes with a number of implications of the sustainability of this elasticity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, an indigenous group living at the margins of Israeli space, as a means to spotlight the sub-national political settlements that form/are formed by relations between borderland communities and the state in which they are embedded.

Paper long abstract:

As a starting point, this paper shifts attention from borderlands that straddle national lines of sovereignty, to borderlands that map onto contested frontiers, within states. Building from the case of Palestinian citizens of Israel, an othered indigenous minority that lives at the edges of Israeli-Jewish space and society, it is concerned with the kinds of sub-national political settlements formed within 'internal borderlands', and between their leaders/elites and the state in which they are embedded. The case study spotlights two regions in Israel where its Palestinian citizens are concentrated and have anchored their political struggles: the Central Galilee in the north, where Palestinian citizens have produced an enclave of Palestinian politics, culture, language and institutions, in direct contravention to the state's logics of erasure and replacement; and the Naqab desert region in the south, where the state's Bedouin-Palestinian citizens have produced their own methods of spatial resiliency and resistance, vis a vis a spectrum of transfer policies. In both cases, we find examples of the borderland logics that produce difference, agency and distance, struggles, contestation and elite bargains that maintain them against erasure, and brokers that translate and navigate between these communities and the state. We also find the state working to integrate and discipline these spaces, whereas once it sought only to circumvent or exclude them. The paper will investigate how these ambiguous logics and practices maintain Palestinian-citizen borderlands in Israel, and how they extend (and possibly challenge) current thinking on political settlements and borderland dynamics.