Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to describe and understand the concepts of justice amongst peruvian rondas campesinas (peasant surveillance patrols). The rondas campesinas emerged in 1970 decade of the last century, in the rural communities of Peru.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to describe and understand the concepts of justice amongst peruvian rondas campesinas (peasant surveillance patrols). The rondas campesinas emerged in 1970 decade of the last century, in the rural communities of Peru. Their purpouse was to halt the actions of abigeos (cattle thieves) and, during the inner armed conflict in the 1980 decade, to fight against the maoist guerrilla Sendero Luminoso. Currently, the main goal of the rondas campesinas (organization recognized by the whole local population) is to administrate justice. The ronderos (peasant watchmen) ventilan (they expose and inform to the whole community) communal problems such families struggles, conflicts about territories, water, heredity, etc.

Based on etnography, the main purpouse of my research is to understand the native notion of justicia comunal (comunal justice). The justicia comunal is practiced by the rondas campesinas in opposition to justicia ordinaria (ordinary justice). The justicia ordinaria is the justice done by the state, considered as inefficient and corrupted. In addition to this role as administradora de justicia (justice administrator), the ronda campesina act as fiscalizadora (prosecutor) of diverse institutions of the peruvian State. Suming up, the forms of justice administration, the different native kinds of justice, the way of exposing communal problems and the mode in which the prosecution of the State institutions is applied, constitute the main axes to understand the native concepts of justice.

The fieldwork made for this research has taken place in Macusani, district of Carabaya, settled in the highlands of Puno in the Peruvian Andes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to understand how through the ambivalence of lower bureaucracies, examined through their functioning, positionality and their imagination of state and a citizen, one can locate varied narratives of workings of state-making, violence and debates surrounding citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The Indian State's citizenship project in Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) got published in August 2019 and has left out 1.9 million people. A massive exercise of state-making, it relied extensively on infrastructure of technology and documents. Particular softwares were used to collect, segregate and verify the documents that were used to examine one's citizenship. This also makes the process extremely 'rigid', 'rational' and hence 'error-free' (at least believed to be so). However, the involvement of various levels of bureaucrats adds interesting complexities to this narrative.

This paper will understand the NRC through the functioning of the lower bureaucracy. Moving away from a Weberian understanding of an ideal-typical bureaucracy and moving closer to the understanding of a bureaucracy through its encounters, experiences and performances in the everyday as exemplified by F. G. Bailey, Akhil Gupta or Nayanika Mathur, I argue that the lower bureaucracy involved cuts through the understanding of the NRC as 'scientific' and 'rigid'. I understand how the lower bureaucracy brings in this disjuncture into the narrative. Further, based on my interactions with lower officials and observations in NRC centers, I argue that this lower bureaucracy displays ambivalence in both its beliefs and practices. The question that is further explored is what does this ambivalence reflects about notions of state-making and the state in South-Asia and how such ambivalence of lower bureaucracy adds in to this crisis of citizenship. This will further enrich us on how infrastructures get performed, adapted and imagined on the ground.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to examine, through the lens of space and infrastructure, two different notions of citizenship and belonging. One of a modern post-colonial Indian state, and one different time-space that is implicit in its participation and patronage of Muslim shrines known as dargahs.

Paper long abstract:

Visitation of Sufi shrines (dargahs) is a quotidian practice in Hyderabad, India. However, a deeper examination into the networks and practices surrounding dargahs reveal an implicit set of practices belonging to an earlier regime, juxtaposed with an expanding neoliberal metropolitan Hyderabad today.

Amidst Hyderabad's modern cityscape, pockets of the city, including the "Old City", operate in different time-spaces. Formerly a princely state of the Nizams, Hyderabad was forcibly occupied by the Indian independent state in 1947. Discrepant administrations between old and new regimes have contributed to elusive land rights and regulation. These discrepant, intangible state infrastructures have led to haphazard urban planning, overcrowding and land encroachment. There has been illegal piping of waste systems to waterbodies, and a general neglect of physical infrastructures constructed by the Nizams; such as lakes, urban settlement and architecture which are now managed by the Indian State administration.

Although past monarchs have faded in power and presence within the state, their late spiritual Sufi advisors; buried in dargahs, and their successors today, are still being patronized among local communities, forming allegiances of a citizenship in a different time-space. Their networks and alliances with former aristocrats create a different spatial existence and legitimacy, with land endowment gifted by past rulers. These are intertwined in a web of networks between the present municipality and historic ruling. By navigating spaces and networks surrounding Muslim dargahs, I unpack the heterogenous notions of citizenship and belonging of Hyderabadis, through patronage, politics and land rights surrounding dargahs and their successors.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of electricity infrastructures in helping to create, expand or limit the contours of the state in post-colonial Mozambique, exploring the various interests they serve in enhancing the capacity of the state to order, arrange and 'read' its territory and citizenry.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the role of electricity infrastructures in helping to create, expand or limit the contours of the state in post-colonial Mozambique. Through a focus on recent electrification campaigns and attempts to improve sustainable energy access, we argue that the extension of electricity infrastructures helps to counter the state's 'blindness' and to provide a more permanent visibility for the state whilst potentially enhancing its capacity to order, arrange and 'read' its territory and citizenry (particularly in contested rural peripheries). We argue that the material and symbolic work of large-scale infrastructural works around rural electrification and grid extension constitute an important means through which the state performs and narrates its presence and role in order to gain meaning and importance in the lives of rural residents and to forge connections with them. Aside from extending the power and reach of state institutions and their territorial authority, we contend that the development of electricity infrastructures also helps to create neoliberal subjectivities and advance neoliberalisation whilst creating lucrative opportunities for elite accumulation. We examine the different forms of institutional, material and discursive power that influence why some ways of organising energy are privileged over others and reflect on the resulting implications for energy access inequalities and state-citizen relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the states infrastructure monitoring systems for disaster management during Australia's recent bushfires, with analysis focused on how interactions between individual citizens was mediated, producing information and incoherence, access and exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

During Australia's recent bushfires, state control centres used phone applications to map threats and manage populations. Newly developed information management systems for monitoring infrastructure pushed out live updates directly to users on how to circumnavigate danger. Over the 5-day crisis, an array of notifications advising socio-spatial processes for self-preservation were generated. But it was unclear how state-controlled ways of knowing and acting integrated with local systems of care. This paper examines how citizens well-informed by 4G networks circulate in a critical scenario. The aim is to consider infrastructure monitoring as a method that manages populations and ask how can its deployment be managed to ensure the weakest survive. Analysis is based on an autoethnography of sheltering in and evacuating from Mallacoota, a UNESCO world biosphere reserve, alongside a 90 and 5-year-old far from home. The dynamic situation framed users of the state's app as architects of collective action plans. But as the fast-moving fire fronts became more animated, the infrastructure monitoring systems converted knowledge holders from key actors into populations receiving transmissions. Is the state's insistence on transforming locals threatened by bushfires into app users and information managers a problem? With the state investing in more and more infrastructure monitoring, coupled with the advent of mobile capabilities that index localised movements, how people navigate disasters is constantly updating. Navigating material and media environments during Australia's 2020 bushfire laid bare how the live maps we follow enact a particular version of events, remediating how those on the ground define informed decision making and diagnose action plans.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines infrastructural 'state effects' by focusing on local mayors in the conflict over planned high-speed railway in the Italian Alps. The analysis reveals a disorderly topology where hierarchy, scale, centre-periphery relations, inclusion and exclusion in 'the state' are contested.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the 'state effects' of a large-scale infrastructural project through a focus on local mayors entangled in the conflict over the planned transnational high-speed railway in the Italian Alpine Valley of Susa (Valsusa). I argue that this focus reveals a complex and dynamic topology of 'the state', against the grain of Foucauldian and Lefebvrian paradigms in thinking about 'state space'. The spatiality of contemporary governmentality has been described by anthropologists in terms of 'verticality' and 'encompassment'. Concurrently, the recent literature on infrastructures highlights the promise of road and railway systems to produce integrated and continuous state space. In contrast, the view from Valsusa suggests a much more disorderly political spatiality. Local residents have resisted the rail project for thirty years. The mayors of the thirty-nine municipalities in the valley have been caught up in the ambiguities of simultaneously representing 'the state' and internally divided constituencies. Some have chosen to collaborate with the central government, while others took part in protests, climbed barricades and faced the police while wearing their official insignia. Meanwhile, the government has redrawn the boundaries of local administrative units and manipulated the conditions of local institutions' inclusion in decision-making forums. Many local inhabitants, as well as the dissident mayors themselves, perceive this prolonged situation as 'the state fighting against the state'. What emerges from the analysis is a political space where hierarchy, scale, centre-periphery relations, inclusion and exclusion are all fought over and redefined through conflict, and 'the state' itself is a shape-shifter.

Paper short abstract:

Extra-continental migrants in Central America have provoked the emergence of a new, state-run transit infrastructure. By disentangling local navigations of this infrastructure, this paper provides insight into the fraught attempts of Central American states to regain control over transit migration.

Paper long abstract:

The journeys of African, Cuban and Haitian migrants across Central America have provoked the emergence of a new, state-run transit infrastructure, including documents, reception centers and (informal) policing. Ultimately, this infrastructure is designed to control the mobility of people on their way to North America, converting a diversity of migrants into a designated group of transit migrants that needs to be invisibilized, revised and re-directed by the Central American states they pass through. However, far from constituting a concerted approach, this infrastructure does not materialize equally along the route. As state officials, other local actors and migrants themselves perform and navigate emerging infrastructures amidst changing geopolitical dynamics, this 'social navigation' in 'a moving environment' (Vigh, 2009) shapes these infrastructures in turn. The paper is based on research with so-called extra-continental migrants along the borders of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. To disentangle the navigations of transit infrastructure across Central America, the paper explores the following questions: where and when do state officials and migrants interact, and consolidate the emerging transit infrastructure? In what ways becomes this infrastructure embedded in the diverse localities that make up migrants' journeys? And how do migrants interrupt this infrastructure, and/or deal with its interruptions? By disentangling local navigations of transit infrastructure, the paper provides insight into the fraught attempts of Central American states to regain control over transit migration, and the ways in which these attempts shape border landscapes and migrant experiences alike.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from an ethnographic analysis of tangible and intangible infrastructures of mobility in Lebanon, I argue that desire for the state is constantly displaced by the state's own underlying incoherence, which resurfaces problematically in contradictory practices and encounters with citizens.

Paper long abstract:

Although the state is not a coherent unit, mundane encounters with bureaucracies, policies and public officials reify and instantiate it in the life of individuals (Gupta 1995, Mitchell 1999). It is in this guise that the state may be 'desired' by citizens (and non-citizens) as an enabler of 'normal lives' (Jansen 2013). Yet, ambivalent feelings continue to be observed amongst those who in principle desire 'more state' and who could benefit from increased state presence.

This is the case of everyday mobility in Beirut, where inadequate road infrastructure, lacking public transport, and the paralysing road congestion that follows pushes commuters to yearn for a state that does not manifest itself by means of its absence. Yet, increased public intervention in the area of infrastructural development, such as installation of traffic lights and the introduction of a new, stricter road code - themselves instances of Foucaldian governmentality -, has only intensified feelings of disaffection amongst commuters. Abiding by the code, in fact, can still be circumvented by those with political connections (wasta), by appealing to a parallel and competing manifestation of the Lebanese state, the 'corrupt' state.

Drawing from this context, I argue that even when desire for one manifestation of the state is present (Obeid 2010), the tension between heterogeneous and incoherent practices of statecraft destabilises these attachments. The fragile, reified unity of the state is disrupted by its underlying incoherence, which resurfaces in the shape of contradicting performances to mark citizens' encounters with state action with frustrations and discontent.