- Convenors:
-
Hamid Khalafallah
(University of Manchester)
Muez Ali (UCL)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Agents of development: Communities, movements, volunteers and workers
Short Abstract
This panel explores how non-state actors exercise agency and reimagine development amid state collapse and uncertainty. It examines how grassroots groups and civil society, as well as violent non-state actors, construct alternative futures, reshaping power, governance, and development from below.
Description
This panel continues a conversation started at the 2025 DSA on non-state actors in political crises, by turning to the spaces of possibility that emerge amid uncertainty. As states collapse under conflict, authoritarianism, or other forms of political crisis, non-state actors are asserting new forms of order, care, and legitimacy from below. While state structures disintegrate, their agency becomes more certain, inventive, future-oriented—and at times opportunistic—resulting in a paradox of uncertain states but certain non-state actors.
Yet, non-state actors such as civil society groups and grassroots movements are not merely responding to state failure or humanitarian emergencies; they are actively imagining and constructing alternative futures. We have also seen violent non-state actors playing similar roles. Across the global South and beyond, these actors demonstrate agency under constraint, redefining what “development” means through self-organisation, mutual aid, and everyday governance, especially where traditional institutions have failed.
The panel asks: How do non-state actors navigate uncertainty to reproduce social life and reimagine governance? How do they exercise agency in contexts of systemic collapse? How do their initiatives unsettle dominant understandings of development, power, and the state? What alternative logics of development do they enact? And how might these experiences compel development studies to move beyond state-centred frameworks towards more plural, grounded, and relational understandings of power and agency?
We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions that engage with these questions, particularly those exploring how non-state actors act as architects of alternative worlds, expanding the conceptual boundaries of development beyond institutions and crises.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
Drawing on a political ethnography of a Dalit agrarian resistance movement in western India, this paper argues that non-state actors, such as grassroots movements of marginalized communities, reshape state-society relations from below, challenging extant Western theoretical conceptualizations.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how Dalit agrarian resistance in western India reshapes state–society relations through what I call the art of engaging with the state. Drawing on a political ethnography of Maanavi Haqqa Abhiyaan (Campaign for Human Rights), an anti-caste land-rights movement, particularly of occupying grazing land in the Marathwada region of western India, I show how landless Dalits neither passively accept the failed implementation of land reform nor seek “reactive statelessness” (Scott, 2009). Instead, they tactically negotiate with the State. First, they make the injustice of landlessness “legible” to the state by artfully deploying legal provisions under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Second, they foreground the non-material meanings of land – dignity and self-respect – rendering land rights an ideational as much as an economic claim. Third, they claim de facto rights to government land by asserting vernacular semiotics of land occupation over land encroachment. Together, these strategies illuminate how marginalized communities see and reshape the state from below, enabling more inclusive policies.
Paper short abstract
In the Niger Delta, ex-militants use violence to become capitalists, via a reward system that gives them access to surveillance contracts and political positions. Hence, they are reshaping community and state power structures within a patronage system, sidelining the struggle for ecological justice.
Paper long abstract
While the focus has been on critiquing extractive elites in natural resources-endowed localities in the Niger Delta, existing studies have tended to overlook how conflict actors, particularly the warlords, have used violence as a commodity to evolve into a militia capitalist class. This paper bridges this gap in knowledge by showing how ex-militants, using their previous statuses as militia leaders, leverage the economy of conflict to attract corporate rewards such as surveillance contracts for oil and gas infrastructures as well as mouthwatering political appointments. This reward system eventually propels ex-militia leaders into becoming conflict bourgeoisie, giving them access to resources that now aid their ability to reshape community and state power structures. The paper employs the political economy approach as both a theoretical and analytical framework. It relies on secondary sources of data such as government reports, media archives, and security contract exposures, to expose this transformation. The paper submits that ex-militants now turned militia capitalists have been able to entrench a patronage-driven development that rests on the reward of violence through economic and political incentives, while sidelining the genuine struggle for ecological justice. Thus, with this massive wealth and formal political appointments, militia capitalists now wield significant resources that they deploy in reshaping the power structure of their respective communities and states in the region. Among others, the paper recommends a re-evaluation or reimagining of Niger Delta development beyond elite pacts that hand huge oil and gas infrastructure surveillance contracts to ex-militants.
Paper short abstract
Delhi's Land Pooling Policy, framed as an equitable model of land assembly, unfolds through uncertainty and everyday speculation. This paper uses a Speculative and Agrarian Lens to explore how non-state actors reimagine futures via everyday speculative practices rooted in socio-political relations.
Paper long abstract
Delhi’s Land Pooling Policy (LPP) envisions creating world class smart neighbourhoods through conversion of agricultural lands and the active involvement of private sector in the assembly, planning, development, and financing of land. Though the policy is framed as equitable and participatory, its implementation remains fraught with political contestations, negotiations, and everyday speculation. The process of land assembly has become a terrain of uncertainty, hope, aspirations, and contestation, where diverse actors, including landowners, developers, bureaucrats, politicians, and financiers, strategically speculate to undertake various practices on the periphery that disrupt policy outcomes.
This paper examines how non-state actors – landowners, landless, intermediaries, and village collectives - actively reimagine and negotiate through everyday speculative practices that are shaped not only by financial motives but also by social, cultural, and political factors rooted in caste, kinship, colonial legacies, and historical village affiliations over a period. Combining Speculative Urbanism with Agrarian Urbanism, the paper conceptualises the periphery as a dynamic frontier where past claims and future imaginaries intertwine to produce an uneven geography. The framework engages with the concept of Agrarian Urbanism to interrogate the social and agrarian worlds that underpin land speculation.
Methodologically, the paper is grounded in critical ethnography and proposes a multi-method qualitative-spatial approach to uncover counter-stories that challenge power relations and structural inequalities. The research represents an interesting case of state uncertainty, where continuous policy amendments and delays in the implementation have initiated a set of practices from a diverse network of actors living, working, or interested in the periphery.
Paper short abstract
This paper aims to explore how the social identities of gender, age and ethnicity shape how artisanal and small-scale miners come together to collectively bargain for mining rights in Kenya.
Paper long abstract
Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) constitutes a socio-economic space in which actors with diverse, overlapping and sometimes conflicting social identities converge, shaping access to and claims over mining rights. In an environment of constrained agency, where the state has mostly employed top-down approaches, I aim to unpack how artisanal and small-scale miners organise themselves to navigate this traditionally neglected sector.
On gender dynamics, women’s participation in ASM has increasingly taken place through collective action, evidenced by the emergence of women-only and women-majority mining groups in the region. This has contributed to shifting gendered power relations within a traditionally male-dominated and patriarchal sector. Preliminary findings reveal that women have been able to improve their status in the ASM spaces, through their grassroots organisations and the support of male allies and other of civil society organisations.
Findings on age reveal a more contradictory picture. Despite extensive literature highlighting the growing role of youth in ASM across Sub-Saharan Africa, youth participation in the study areas remains largely passive, prioritising alternative sources of livelihood like brokerage, transport and retail. This raises important questions about the future of ASM and the prospects of collective agency by the youth in a sector dominated by older generations.
Finally, competing legitimacies, rooted in indigeneity on one hand and long-term occupation and settlement on the other, influence miners’ perceptions of entitlement to land and mining rights. While ASM sites are often characterised as multicultural spaces, ethnic allegiances shape how miners organise collectively and define their priorities within mining spaces.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography at a Sufi dargah in Delhi, this paper examines sacral healing as non-state governance amid institutional uncertainty. it shows how care, justice, and authority are reimagined through everyday religious practices beyond the state.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how non-state religious institutions emerge as sites of governance, care, and legitimacy under conditions of institutional uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Hazrat Mai Sahiba dargah in Delhi, it explores apotropaic healing practices related to spirit possession as a form of everyday governance that operates beyond the state.
The paper conceptualizes the figure of the Hazrat Mai Sahiba, a venerated women saint as as a sacral sovereign—a non-state authority that performs juridical, therapeutic, and moral functions simultaneously. For devotees navigating suffering, illness, and social precarity, the dargah functions as an adalat (court), sarkar (government), and healing institution, offering modes of justice and care unavailable through formal systems such as hospitals, police, or courts. Rather than merely responding to state failure, these practices actively produce alternative social orders through ritual discipline, dreams, ethical obedience, and affective relations.
Engaging with scholarship on political theology, governmentality, and everyday ethics, the paper shows how sacral authority regulates conduct, shapes subjectivities, and reorganizes social life under conditions of uncertainty. healing here is not an isolated therapeutic act but a prolonged process through which governance is embedded in the ordinary.
By foregrounding lives experiences of care and authority in a religious non-state space through interviews and participatory observation, the paper unsettles state-centred frameworks in development studies and contributes to debates on how non-state actors imagine and enact alternative futures. It argues for understanding development not only through institutions and policy but through grounded, relational, and affective forms of governance emerging from below.
Paper short abstract
This paper evaluates youth-led protests using a symbolic–substantive outcomes framework. Analysing #OccupyNigeria and #EndSARS, it shows that protests yield mainly symbolic and limited substantive change, while strengthening democratic resilience and civic engagement in sub-Saharan Africa.
Paper long abstract
Over the past two decades, scholarship on youth political participation in sub-Saharan Africa has highlighted two dominant trends: growing youth disillusionment driven by persistent developmental failures, and the rise of youth-led protests, often critiqued as evidence of electoral apathy. Yet, in contexts characterised by weak electoral institutions and limited prospects for free and fair elections, this interpretation underestimates the political significance of protests.
This paper re-examines youth-led protests as consequential modes of political participation and potential frontiers of democratic resilience. It introduces a conceptual framework that distinguishes between symbolic and substantive protest outcomes. Symbolic outcomes refer to short-term governmental responses, including public declarations and temporary policy measures, while substantive outcomes capture long-term, systemic, and structural changes that address the underlying drivers of protest mobilisation.
The framework is applied to two youth-led protests in Nigeria: #OccupyNigeria (2012) and #EndSARS (2020). While these protests articulated immediate demands around petroleum subsidy policies and police accountability, respectively, they were underpinned by broader calls for societal transformation, particularly an end to corruption, impunity, and poor governance. The paper analyses protest demands, state responses, the extent and durability of policy commitments, and their evolution over time.
The findings suggest that although both protests yielded limited substantive change, they played a critical role in reshaping political discourse, expanding civic space, and contesting state authority. The paper concludes that youth-led protests should therefore be understood as integral components of contemporary democratic practice and resilience in sub-Saharan Africa.
Paper short abstract
Ticuna women spontaneously form a collective and reimagine development beyond the state, building alternative futures through food sovereignty, autonomy, and care, demonstrating non-state agency under uncertainty while constructing relational pluriversal worlds grounded in Indigenous knowledge.
Paper long abstract
In the Amazon Basin, Indigenous rights and knowledge systems are routinely instrumentalised or marginalised by state actors and external institutions. The core challenge therefore lies not in merely expanding participation within existing development frameworks, but in fundamentally reimagining development itself, redistributing power, and reawakening diverse knowledge systems and cosmologies. In contexts of environmental degradation, political uncertainty, and contested boundaries, meaningful transformation is increasingly emerging from the ground up through Indigenous knowledge, everyday practices, and community-driven autonomous action.
This research examines how Ticuna Indigenous women collective emerges as non-state actors actively reconfiguring agrifood systems and redesigning alternative futures. Focusing on the localized, bottom-up structure, this research analyses the Saberes y Sabores Ticuna, a woman-led community-based organization in the Colombian Amazon through a mixed-methods approach, comprising participant observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, cooking meetings, and secondary data analysis. It investigates how these Tikuna women reimagine development (Meechi Torü Maú - good living), the challenges they face, and how their innovative practices in pursuit of prosperity drive transitions within the agrifood system, from chagra (farmland) to the table. Specifically, it examines how Ticuna women autonomously restore, innovate, and share traditional recipes, thereby preserving Indigenous food culture, empowering women, fostering a multispecies ethic that extends beyond human concerns, and unsettling dominant, state-centred models of agrifood development. By foregrounding Indigenous women’s agency under conditions of uncertainty, the research contributes to the articulation of relational and pluriversal alternative worlds grounded in Indigenous autonomy, food sovereignty, and the creative power of communities at the margins.
Paper short abstract
This paper unveils dynamics of inequality within the hierarchical humanitarian structure at the Colombia/Venezuela border. It analyses processes of dependence and contested narratives of aid from grassroot organizations towards international cooperation in the light of the USAID funding withdrawal.
Paper long abstract
The dismantling of USAID in January 2025, combined with the largest displacement Colombia experienced in the 21st-century caused by the armed conflict in Catatumbo, triggered the onset of a polycrisis along the Northeast Colombia–Venezuela border. Colombia, the largest USAID funding recipient in Latin America and the Caribbean, was hit by the most severe global funding crisis in the history of international cooperation, affecting more than 70% of the sector in the country. This collapse threatened the survival of humanitarian and development actors in a region already facing some of the highest unemployment rates in the country, and in a city through which circa 50% of Venezuelan migrants cross, and where more than 60 organizations had operated over the past decade. But it also exposed deep power hierarchies, inequalities, dependency structures, and forms of resistance.
Based on 6 months of ethnographic research and 35 interviews in Cúcuta and Bogotá in 2025, this PhD chapter thesis unveils dynamics of inequality within hierarchical humanitarian structures at the border. It analyses processes of dependence from grassroot organizations towards international cooperation, along with counternarratives that showed relief in the light of the funding withdrawal. This chapter shows how Colombia, upon its dependency on U.S. funding, has a robust and strong – but precarious and wasted – grassroot humanitarian structure that operated in the region for decades. It allows to reflect on how the USAID withdrawal can be critically seen as an opportunity to reshape governance from below and reimagine new futures in a post-aid era.