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Paper short abstract:

Desert dwellers’ understanding of the “nature” of the Pakistani state in the region of Cholistan, South Punjab, bordering India, is informed by their perception of infrastructural changes that link up to border-making practices as well as the “outsourcing” of sovereignty to the United Arab Emirates.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures have social and political lives that provide avenues to understanding the relationship between state, territory, materiality and affect. Addressing infrastructural changes in the Cholistan desert, South Punjab, Pakistan, adjacent to Rajasthan in India, my paper focusses on societal transformations engendered by border-making processes. How do trading, pastoral and peripatetic communities who previously moved freely across the desert, relate to a variety of infrastructural changes that have redone their lifeworlds?

Infrastructure development altered the regional ecology and economy of the Indo-Pak borderlands and contributed to shifting mobility patterns. State constructed canal infrastructures, transporting water into the desert, caused nomadic communities to be settled as sedentary peasants. Along with declining transit routes across the desert, residues of forts and oases, crucial for survival and movement, turned into nostalgic reminders of nomadic pasts and desert livelihoods. However, instead of touristifying existing heritage sites, the Pakistani “rentier state” “outsourced” territorial sovereignty to the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. erected its own infrastructure in the desert: every winter, thousands of Emiratis land with private planes on two exclusively constructed airports, roam with their own vehicles on highways built by themselves through the desert in order to hunt several endangered species, which they actively conserve and breed, too. Emiratis also built two palaces and a fruit orchard, pool local water, and apparently traffic Cholistani girls for sex work. Concentrating on a visible but silenced discourse about dominance, I aim to demonstrate that borderlanders’ subaltern understanding of the state intersects with their perceptions of infrastructural change.