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- Convenors:
-
Axel Rudi
(University of Bergen)
Theodoros Rakopoulos (University of Oslo)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
With the recent resurgence of discourses on belonging and nativity, where different groups and peoples seek to "take back" their land, we ask: "Back from whom?". Reflecting on the relation between fragmented and robust statehood, we invite critical perspectives on sovereignty and territory.
Long Abstract:
We are living the vengeance of sovereignty. After decades of celebrating globalisation, the last few years have seen a massive turn to nativist and indigenist political discourse, that in various forms claims to “take back our land”. The crises of globalisation included environmental degradation, but also a shift onto the politics of reclaiming territory. Seeking an intellectual and emotive “root” for people and communities runs counter not only to accelerating movement of capital and people, but also to modes of analysis, unsettling common understandings of “belonging.” This panel will tackle this moment in time, by looking at how the different ways the politics of territoriality not only survive but triumph. It asks whether the “resurgence” of claims on territory, roots and belonging is new, where it comes from, and where it is leading. The panel will thus analyse this current shift, asking, “back from whom?” – and for whom?
We welcome papers that engage with movements and tendencies, from radical to reactionary, that claim belonging, rootedness and territoriality. Specifically, we are looking for contributions that re-examine such claims to land in relation to critical perspectives on sovereignty and changing state forms. In this way, the discussion can also focus on the fragmented, pending, imagined, and reconstructed forms of territoriality and adjacent sovereignty. Situating this inquiry within the state-sovereignty-territory nexus, we aim to bring forth perspectives that can shed light on new movements of de/globalization.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Chiara Arnavas (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper advances our understanding of the phenomenon of land mafia and its sovereignty practices within India’s Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Paper long abstract:
This paper advances our understanding of the phenomenon of land mafia and its sovereignty practices within India’s Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It has been argued that criminal networks represent an attack to neoliberal policies and the capacity of the State to enact good governance practices. Yet, anthropological studies of crime have moved away from narrow definitions of criminal organizations as autonomous, internally cohesive, and bounded systems. However, the question of how criminal networks establish their sovereignty on the ground is still open and deserves further attention. Without an adequate analysis of how land mafias - criminal groups active in coercive land grabbing and real estate markets - actually permeate the formal realms of state and capital, we overlook the exacerbating social inequalities that make these entwined coalitions possible. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the newly-built Green City in the periphery of Kolkata, this paper considers the social embeddedness of land mafia, to illuminate the sovereignty practices among the actors who occupy the intertwined realms of crime, state, and business. I argue that the Hindu upper-caste leaders of land mafia achieve their territorial sovereignty and control over land through interlocked forms of exploitation. I trace how land mafia works through forms of land reclamation and landowning practices that exacerbate inequalities for, and criminalize lower-class, lower-caste Muslim communities. Ultimately, I argue that who calls whom a mafioso, and the sovereignty that this term carries with it, is based on religion, class and caste privilege, and legitimation.
Max Kramer (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
For this presentation, I will analyze the relationship between popular cinema and popular sovereignty in India. Specifically, I will address a limitation in the way popular power is imagined for Indian Muslims in Hindi films, focusing on the portrayal of popular power through the gangster boss.
Paper long abstract:
For this presentation, I will analyze the relationship between popular cinema and popular sovereignty in India. I will address a particular limitation in the imagination of popular power for Indian Muslims in Hindi films. This limitation, as argued by Faisal Devji, is that popular sovereignty can only be imagined through the gangster boss who takes power back from corrupt elites. By tracing the way popular sovereignty is mediated through the figure of the benign gangster boss in the recent history of Hindi film, I will first show how this imagination is constituted in the melodramatic mode. Second, I will explore how the circulation of snippets of the melodramatic mode constitutes an important element in current Muslim politics in India. Finally, I will conclude my argument by questioning to what extent this political imagination is adequate to think about the current state of deinstitutionalization of the Indian Union and the digital circulation of melodramatic fragments.
Aditi Saraf (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
My paper examines the relation between land and sovereignty in Indian-controlled Kashmir as rooted in history rather than in notions of indigeneity, by tracing the contemporary language of land rights to princely forms of protection and stewardship.
Paper long abstract:
My paper examines historical connections between land and sovereignty in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where a movement for self-determination/azaadi has been ongoing for decades. In 2019, the Indian government removed exclusive rights to buy and sell land vested in the “permanent residents” of Jammu and Kashmir, an act perceived by many as beginning an overt settler-colonial project aimed at changing the Muslim-majority demography of the Kashmir valley. I examine the existential threat posed by the loss of land rights against the historical refusal regarding setting up a land market in Kashmir. Reading together land transfer controversies, the history of land reform, and disputes between princely rulers and British colonial traders around private property, I show how maintaining land as “inalienable wealth” (Weiner 1989) became a signature of sovereignty in this region. During my fieldwork, assessments of sovereignty tied to the idea of hifazat – an Urdu word that means “to protect or guard” – invoked princely extraction alongside the princely protection of land and natural resources. While current demands self-determination are not rooted in past kingship as a basis for demanding political autonomy, ideas of hifazat emerge as distinctive political traces that underwrite ongoing struggles against political “selling out”, environmental destruction and land expropriation - drawing attention to claims on land rooted not in ideas of indigeneity, but in the twists and turns of history.
Giacomo Sartori Veronese (University of Oslo (UiO))
Paper short abstract:
Exploring the Turkish-sponsored securitized landscape across the Kurdish borderland and its relations to local trans-border economies, this contribution will reflect on how a diffused security regime reconfigures state power in its margins, through the imagined myth of ‘smuggling terror.’
Paper long abstract:
In the geographical area of Kurdistan – throughout southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq – territorial sovereignty remains a deeply contested issue. As a region of great interest for many transnational political actors, due to its migratory routes, oil infrastructures, and ethnic-political effervescence, Turkey has been readjusting its sovereignty (re)claiming efforts. After the collapse of the ‘peace process’ in 2015, the Kurdish rural and urban areas suffered a new wave of violence and witnessed the militarized presence of the Turkish state. Furthermore, the state-tribal relations over border territorial control have reshaped the co-construction of sovereignty locally through renewed security apparatuses, such as the village-guard system (korucu) and enhanced aerial technologies.
Yet, despite the capillary securitization of the Southeast, informal transnational economies have continued to thrive across the Turkey-Iraq borderline. Often labeled as smuggling (‘kaçakçılık’), these trans-border economies and their territorialized flows open a window to study the local effects of sovereignty through the framework of security.
Based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in the region, this presentation will explore the securitized landscape across the Kurdish borderlands in an attempt to reflect on how a diffused security regime reconfigures state power in its margins. Guided by a locally negotiated security logic to prevent ‘smuggling terror,' this contribution will reflect on the fragmented yet changing condition of Turkish state territorial sovereignty.
Leandros Fischer
Paper short abstract:
Centred on German reactions to the Gaza genocide, this paper highlights the sovereigntist continuities of 'post-national' discourses centred on Holocaust memory. By performing a cosmopolitan ethos, German neo-sovereigntism demarkates its boundaries both discusrively and physically.
Paper long abstract:
Based on online ethnography and observation of physical events, this paper aims to highlight the ‘post-national’ lineages of German neo-sovereigntist discourse, by focusing on the Gaza genocide. The latter has accelerated official German identification with Zionism, understood not only atonement for Nazi crimes but as part of a new muscular liberalism threatened by external Others.
Kundnani (2023) situates this shift in the way ideas of the EU as a deterritorialised ‘normative power’ have been replaced by talk of a ‘European sovereignty’ harking back to the colonial and whiteness-induced origins of European integration. Despite being lauded as a way of forging a 'post-national' identity fit for a globalised world, Germany’s Holocaust-centred ‘memory culture’ has been criticised for its blindspots towards anti-Muslim racism (Özyürek 2023). However, much of these particularisms have been criticised as aberrations from the allegedly cosmopolitan spirit of Erinnerungskultur.
Rather than approaching ‘deglobalisation’ and ‘sovereignty’ as a binary opposites, this paper argues that the boundaries between both can often be quite fluid. In contrast to right-wing populists (both in Germany and elsewhere) performing rootedness against the forces of globalisation, German elites perform a selective inclusivity to demarcate the boundaries of belonging, both symbolically and physically, and thus entrench sovereignty. By declaring Hamas 'worse than Nazis', the uncomfortable German past can be rehabilitated, while 'mass deportations' against real or alleged Hamas supporters can be justified. At the same time, these elites attempt to 'take back control' of historical narratives, perceived under threat by the growing visibility of past colonial crimes.
Matan Kaminer (Queen Mary University London)
Paper short abstract:
Focused on the role of migrant workers in reconstruction of Israel’s “Gaza Envelope” following the Hamas attack of 7/10 and the subsequent assault on Gaza, my paper traces the consolidation of a mode of colonial sovereignty which no longer depends on the national identity of those working the land.
Paper long abstract:
Agricultural settlements worked by “Hebrew labor” were historically a hallmark of Israeli settler colonialism, but the murder and abduction of dozens of Thai migrant workers in Hamas’ 7 October attack highlights how some things have changed, while others have not. The settlements of the region known in Israel as the “Gaza Envelope” – populated by Palestinian farmers until the expulsion of 1948 – are still heavily agricultural, but the Jewish pioneers who once “plowed the last furrow” have been replaced by Thai migrant workers. For a generation, these disenfranchised workers, with no stake in the colonial conflict, have been expected to endanger their lives on the frontier.
As Israel began its onslaught on Gaza following the attack, a spokesman for agricultural employers clarified that elites’ vision for reconstruction continues to rely on migrant labor: “if there are no foreign workers,” he remarked, “there won’t be any agriculture. And if there is no agriculture, there won’t be a region.” However, the exodus of Thai migrants from Israel at the start of the war raises the possibility that new “foreign workers” may need to be imported from elsewhere. My paper, based on observation of the first stages of reconstruction in the “Gaza Envelope,” will trace the consolidation of a mode of sovereignty which no longer depends on the national identity of those working the land for its coherence. This mode, I suggest, is apt for a period in which “territoriality” is resurgent while the transnational movement of people seeking livelihood continues apace.
Keye Tersmette (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper follows the ebb and flow of territorial anxiety over Omani-Emirati borderlands through the lens of Madha, an Omani exclave located inside the United Arab Emirates. It shows how fluid conceptions of belonging today clash with notions of territoriality imposed in the mid-twentieth century.
Paper long abstract:
In the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, territorial disputes refuse to disappear: in recent years, a number of cartographic errors, in which parts of Oman are included within the borders of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have laid bare persistent local anxieties about the security of these two countries’ territories. Where some Omanis fear the maps reflect actual Emirati territorial ambitions, other Omanis respond in kind and welcome a reconstitution of Greater Oman, a former, more expansive entity. “Taking back land” signfies not just a return of territory, but seemingly also of history.
This paper pushes the phrase “taking back land” beyond its literal meaning to explore its temporal and epistemological connotations. It traces the source of Omani and Emirati territorial anxieties to a (post-)imperial British vision that, in an effort to secure territory for its protectorates, began to freeze in place otherwise versatile allegiances and malleable claims to land. Through its focus on Madha, an Omani territorial exclave located squarely inside the UAE, this paper demonstrates how questions of national belonging remain unresolved and how border-dwelling Omanis juggle old and new ways of making sense of their connection both to the Omani and Emirati states, and to imaginations beyond these institutions. Drawing on archival research and a combined 17 months of fieldwork in Oman, this paper argues that, in this corner of the Middle East, “taking back land” may entail not just a territorial, but also an epistemological shift that undoes the violence of the past century.
Elena Apostoli Cappello (ULB Universié Libre de Bruxelles)
Paper short abstract:
I analyze cultural consequences of decades-long dispossessions, affecting among others the possibilities of mobilization from below. I focus on a Sardinian protest movement against the installation of offshore wind farms that challenges classifications like “emancipatory” and “nostalgic”.
Paper long abstract:
The EU’s agenda for decarbonization at the heart of the European Green Deal, are facing many challenges, including local opposition, especially in coal- and carbon-intensive regions. The political and identity-based nature of such opposition challenges anthropology to understand a phenomenon that concerns Europe and beyond, hybridizing with socio-political mechanisms often classified as populist or anti-élite, or giving rise to a conflict between work and the environment, landscape and new ecological imaginaries. I present here a fieldwork I am carrying out in Sardinia (Sulcis sub-region, San Pietro meta-island) analyzing the tension between cultural landscapes pivoting on “take back our land” and the emerging environmentalist imaginaries imagined by political discourses. I examine local phenomena that seem to relate to cultural consequences of decades-long dispossessions and extractivist policies, affecting among others the possibilities of mobilization from below. Face to a lack of a protest movement against the serious environmental and social consequences of the presence of the Portovesme coal-fired industrial plants, we observe instead the emergence of a participatory local (municipal) protest movement against the installation of offshore wind farms decided by the Italian central government (as part of the RePower EU framework), a mega-project pivotal to the regional and national energy transition strategy. This latter bottom up protest movement has grown in recent years, is claiming rootedness and territoriality, and is supported by local institutions. State-sovereignty-territory nexus is explored here through the repertories mobilized on the field, that challenges classifications like “emancipatory” and “nostalgic”.
Ola G. Berta (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses PNA's struggle to take back control over their maritime boundaries and to assert property rights over the resources they hold, notably highly migratory tuna species. PNA's collaborative effort opens a critical understanding of state sovereignty as sovereignty by mutuality.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early 1980s, the big ocean states of Oceania have fought a persistent battle to assert and enforce their sovereign rights over their enormous exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the resources they hold, most notably in the form of highly migratory tuna species. For decades, these resources were extracted by distant water fishing vessels without any form of monitoring and without leaving any revenue for the Pacific state whose EEZs in which they were caught. The nationalist drive to claim property rights over the tuna that swims within their maritime boundaries gains its strength from state-level ties of interdependency rather than ideas of state independence. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) is a prime example of this. Through a pronounced ethos of mutuality, these states have built up a cartel-like collaboration that has been instrumental in asserting state sovereignty and regaining control over and state revenue from tuna resources. In recent years, the PNA has made an unprecedented power-play by successfully closing off several pockets of the high seas from commercial exploitation. In this paper, I analyse PNA’s struggle to take back control over their maritime boundaries. This case opens up two critical understandings of sovereignty: sovereignty beyond the state and sovereignty by mutuality, both of which speaks to the changing state forms in Oceania today.
Nicola Manghi (EHESS-CREDO)
Paper short abstract:
Tuvalu's territory is threatened by global warming. While reclaiming land from the ocean promises the possibility of an artficial territorial extension, the indigenous landowners question the Government's title to the land, and threaten to "evict" the State from the archipelago.
Paper long abstract:
The low-lying island State of Tuvalu, threatened by sea level rise, is often discussed as an in vivo specimen of the disappearing State. However, this leads to obliterating the country’s unique territorial regime – one that is poorly described by conventional notions of sovereignty. With the aim of countering this tendency, my paper points at one paradoxical feature of the country’s material constitution: Tuvalu’s Government only owns a small portion of artificial land that was reclaimed from the lagoon of Funafuti, the rest being the customary property of indigenous landowners. As such, most Government infrastructures rest on native land acquired through lease agreements, and, as I will show by recourse to an ethnographic vignette, are structurally exposed to the threat of being evicted. Dwelling on the paradoxical condition of a “renting State”, my paper explores the inherent ambivalence of “land reclamation”, an expression that can signify both efforts to regain control of usurped lands on the part of indigenous landowners and the geoengineering practice of creating artificial land by filling portions of an atoll’s lagoon. Examining the paradoxical “place” of the State within the archipelago can allow developing a new gaze on Tuvalu’s sovereignty. Thus framed, the material, geo-political stakes of land reclamation (“by the State” or “against the State”) in Tuvalu offer a privileged point of observation on post-Westphalian territorialities, allowing to explore fluctuating distinctions between State and estate, territory and land, sovereignty and ownership in the face of incumbent ecological scenarios.