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Paper short abstract:

While scholarship on violent leaders has focused a lot on established violent leaders, this paper looks at the everyday practices of Indian village 'bosses' in the process of establishment to gain a better understanding of how exactly economic, political and social domains relate at the interface.

Paper long abstract:

Recent scholarship on wars, conflicts and violence has described different modalities of 'shadow governance' - governance in which no clear distinctions can be made between legal, illegal, legitimate, illegitimate, public and private. At the same time, anthropology has begun to study perpetrators rather than only the victims of violence and the ways in which violent perpetrators navigate a series of intimately entangled social, political, economic and criminal domains. Much of this scholarship, also in South Asia, has however focused on established violent leaders, who occupy powerful positions both within political parties and international criminal/economic networks. Violence, both performative and nakedly instrumental, serves to preserve existing spheres of influence. Exploring the everyday practices of local 'bosses' in rural South India, I turn my attention in this paper to those bosses that are not yet established. I ask how local bosses establish control over economic resources when they do not have significant political power? How do they make possible political careers in lack of money? And how freely can they use violence when they cannot use financial resources to fund a public image of a good, generous man? How do transgressing the lines between private, public, legal and illegal empower and energize bosses in becoming? By looking into the everyday practices of local bosses in their aspirations to power, I aim to better understand how, at the interface, economic, political and social domains of power enable one another, and finally, how power in conflict and violence is established and reestablished.