Paper short abstract:

Development actors mobilise the poor but fail to understand power relations. Critical researchers explain power relations, but remain vague on what is to be done. Focusing on re-emerging left politics, I explore left activists' challenges between knowledge on power relations and the poors'everyday needs.

Paper long abstract:

The challenges faced by rural poor in Pakistan (this paper focuses on its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province) are on the agenda of mainly two groups of researchers, i.e. those linked to mainstream development circles, and those engaged in critical reflection on agrarian relations. While the first group emphasises analysis that facilitates development interventions (and such interventions talk a lot of 'empowerment' these days), the second prioritises the in-depth understanding of why poverty persists. Though this dichotomisation risks simplification, it hints at a core challenge of contemporary engagements with rural grassroots: Development agents (e.g. NGOs) consider 'social mobilisation' (in the guise of 'community-based organisations') as central to interlink the poor with 'service delivery', but fail to understand local power relations and processes of dis-empowerment. Critical researchers (often following theories of exploitative relations of production) gain deep insights into political processes, but remain vague (at times utopian) in their discussions on "what is to be done, by whom, and how" (Bernstein 2013: 2). It is with this puzzle that the present paper engages, by selecting the recent (re-)emergence in Pakistan of left politics and of debates on land reform as empirical field. Based on interviews with (leftist) activists, it explores the challenges they face in their endeavours of social mobilisation - challenges that are conceptualised in the paper as embedded in (dis)junctures between (critical) analytical knowledge on how power relations (re)produce poverty, and the everyday needs of people in misery that (to put it bluntly) can not wait for social relations to radically change.