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Paper short abstract:

My paper locates the planetary crisis in vulnerabilities of land alienation induced by extractive development projects in India's Jharkhand. It maps out political responses communities make, particularly in territorial forms deploying the threatened landscape itself as a political force.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delves into the collective negotiations of extractive state-corporate power in eastern India. It situates an entanglement of state and corporation in land acquisition campaigns. Private companies' informal methods of social fragmentation have conjoined with government documentation tools, including expert surveys and studies, to give displacement an impression of inevitability. Yet, affected communities have interrupted the space-making power of the state to take control of or negate landscape and livelihood uncertainties. To unravel the ways communities manage threats of environmental and resource appropriation in the eastern state of Jharkhand, I take two methodical steps. First, I critically engage with the existing scholarship on the Indigenous Pathhalgadi movement to point out ontological erasures in the analyses as they do not adequately foreground the logic of lifeworld vulnerability at the centre of the movement. Second, I draw on my field research on a case of non-indigenous land struggle to explore how socio-environmental associations are politicised in mobilisation against formal procedures and informal tactics of land acquisition. Combining the two cases of collective management of resource vulnerability, the paper reckons territorial politics as a form of community response towards managing and evading socio-environmental crises. It brings into analysis visual and textual narrative material through which the vulnerable landscapes are turned into territories of public control. Centering the question of political power in resource management, the paper argues for considering possibilities of reconfiguring the state’s resource sovereignty at the hands of vulnerable yet resilient communities.