Paper short abstract:

This paper examines work in geography and anthropology that has sought to explore the political life of court processes. The paper probes how subjectivity and imaginations of the state emerge through the workings of legal processes, focusing on the interplay of bodies, materials and evidence.

Paper long abstract:

Sites of legal adjudication - abbreviated imperfectly to 'courts' - have always performed a significant role in the enactment of state sovereignty. The ability to write law and lay claim to legal authority is seen from some theoretical perspectives as evidence of sovereign power. But increasingly anthropologists and legal geographers are querying the straightforward connection between the exercise of law and the intentions of the state, thinking through how the circulation of bodies, materials and affects shape attitudes towards - and outcomes of - judicial processes. This work highlights how courts capture a moment where quotidian practices and mundane materials become the very mechanisms through which the intangible authority of the state is achieved or challenged. For this reason, law becomes an instrument not simply of justice but, in many circumstances, a mechanism of state building and a site of political subjectivity. Drawing on a variety of examples, though dwelling on cases in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the UK, the paper probes how subjectivity and imaginations of the state emerge through the workings of legal processes, focusing on the interplay of bodies, materials and evidence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the temporality and spatiality of displacement and emplacement in the war-torn region of Donbas in Eastern Ukraine and suggests that displacement in space relates to re-orientation in time.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the temporal and spatial logic of displacement and emplacement through an ethnography of Donbas in Eastern Ukraine as a displacement-creating region. It illustrates how withdrawal of the state, in the form of infrastructure that secures the future, may create displacement in place. While to many inhabitants of Donbas the outbreak of war in 2014 brought with it a total disruption of usual patterns of life, to some of them displacement had, in some sense, already occurred in place, but did not come to fruition as movement across space until 2014. The war actualised the unfulfilled migration intentions of especially young people, who recognised that the region was turning into one without a future. Ukrainian independence and statehood in this Post-Soviet borderland had become associated with rising unemployment, collapsing social security, and lack of investment in the region's mines and heavy industries, former flagships of the Soviet project. After the war broke out, the conditions in Donbas deteriorated further. The majority of my informants agreed that it would make no sense to return to Donbas even if the war ended, because the region has no future. They tried to readjust their temporal orientation to the present instead of a past that had been lost and a future that remained uncertain. To do this, they strived to become emplaced within recognisable state structures which would allow life to flow in a predictable way. Sometimes this emplacement was imagined possible only through continued mobility abroad.

Paper short abstract:

This paper takes a cultural approach to the question of the everyday state drawing on the insights of cultural and historical geography and cultural history. It examines the cultural construction of the Lake Pátzcuaro landscape in Central West México during the post-revolutionary period (1920-1940).

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes a cultural approach to the question of the everyday state drawing on the insights of cultural and historical geography and cultural history. From this point of view, the 'nature' of the everyday state is manifested in the transformation of social experience and identities within specific historical contexts. Cultural geography and anthropology share not only a common history but also an interest in questions of culture and identity.

Within cultural geography, questions of culture, space and power have been examined through the study of landscape. My research studies the construction of the Lake Pátzcuaro landscape during the post-revolutionary period, characterised by the emergence of a strong-centralised state and the development of national identity. I examine how particular forms of relating to Lake Patzcuaro emerged and how they defined its character.

Discourses about Lake Patzcuaro circulated through various material supports. Museums and exhibitions displayed Lake Patzcuaro's expressive culture as a symbol of authenticity, which was also incorporated into avant-garde theatre, framing it as modern. The state cultural programme was depicted through murals, setting its development in the landscape. New social and cultural identities were also promoted through school open-air theatre performances. Lastly, limnological research established ideas about Lake Pátzcuaro's origin and nature, shaping people's relationship with the non-human.

Power relations were sustained and contested through everyday practices, acquiring a concrete existence. Scientific discourses about nature were also shaped in their encounter with the non-human world. As a result, both nature and culture in Lake Patzcuaro were transformed.

Paper short abstract:

Oil wealth and postconflict politics reshape urban space. Both have reinforced spatial segregation in Salalah, Oman, cementing the government's victory over the Dhufar region's defeated revolution. Yet postwar spatial tensions contribute to the lingering afterlives of Dhufar's silenced revolution.

Paper long abstract:

Urban environments embody changing political and economic agendas, as the work of anthropologists and human geographers has shown in explorations of space and temporality during political and economic transformations. In cities across the Middle East, petrocarbon wealth has reworked spatial segregation and inequalities. In turn, postconflict urban development has constructed official narratives about a conflict's winners and losers, and about visions for the future. But how do the intersecting effects of oil wealth in combination with postconflict political imperatives affect and rework urban space? In the southern Omani city of Salalah, where in 1975 the Omani government won a counterinsurgency war against the Dhufar region's Marxist revolutionaries, petrocarbon-fuelled economic opportunities and postconflict political imperatives initially intersected to rework and reinforce sociospatial hierarchies and segregation. Oil wealth facilitated the distribution of land and housing that helped orchestrate postconflict governing strategies of divide and rule. Nevertheless, as the availability of public subsidies and suitable land has decreased, the sustainability of Salalah's post-1975 political and economic spatial logics has grown more uncertain. It is no longer so clear that urban space marks the government's oil-era largesse, its victory over Dhufar's former insurgents, and official silence about the defeated revolution. Some of Salalans' alternative experiences of space produce lingering afterlives of Dhufar's defeated revolution - pointing towards a counterhistory of defeated revolution and postconflict, petrocarbon urban space.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines everyday governance through technologies of belonging in the transborder homeland of the Sámi. Challenging the nature of sovereignty in everyday life, it shows that quotidian practices of state-making and contestation are not about maintaining borders, but their fluidity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines everyday governance through technologies of belonging in Sápmi, the Indigenous homeland of the Sámi transcending Fenno-Scandinavian states. Lacking legalized border infrastructure, the boundaries of Sápmi are maintained through constantly shifting social boundaries of material production. Tracing these articulations from trade and tax relations of furs and silver with Norway, Sweden, and Russia in the Middle Ages, to contemporary craft making within a market economy, I show how Sámi artisans create alternative maps of Indigenous practice in relation to state sovereignties. Through techniques of working silver, wood, reindeer, and cloth, people erase administrative borders to define the territory of Sápmi, and claim rights to determine their own affairs in Sámi land. In this way constantly shifting idioms of belonging are crafted materially and through the body to challenge static frameworks of state recognition. Merging anthropological and geographical approaches to border making, the paper reveals how people repurpose daily technologies to express a mutability of territorial governance and community belonging. This challenges the nature of sovereignty in everyday life, showing that quotidian practices of state-making and contestation are not about maintaining borders, but their fluidity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces how the postcolonial Sri Lankan state expanded to the Dry Zone frontier by adopting a high-modernist development model, which was driven by an objective to bring "development" to the country at large and the peripheries in particular, and its post-war revival in 2009.

Paper long abstract:

The imagination of the frontier as "empty" (of civilization) but "full" (of resources) not only allows for the making of a particular landscape, it also helps create and make a certain kind of subject (Bridge 2001; Eilenberg 2014; Korf et al 2013; Li 2014; Tsing 2005; Watts 1992). This paper traces how the postcolonial Sri Lankan state expanded to the Dry Zone frontier by adopting a high-modernist development model, which was driven by an objective to bring "development" to the country at large and the peripheries in particular, and its post-war revival in 2009 in spite of the programme having being considered a failure. I argue that state beneficence in the form of development - the Mahaveli Development Project - manifests itself in the Dry Zone frontier through the giving of "gifts" of land to create peasant colonies in Sri Lanka. Through a discussion of how a "development gift" (Yeh, 2013) of land helps a beneficiary to become a rice farmer and binds him to the state, I trace how the peasant farmer becomes vital for the presence of the state in the frontier. The paper concludes by demonstrating how the Mahaveli Development Programme, while failing as a development project, is an overall success as it was and is yet being used to claim the frontier and to fashion a certain kind of subject who enables the postcolonial state territorialisation agenda.

Paper short abstract:

States across the world are beginning to use behavioural insights - not as a way of governing populations - but as a way of addressing the perceived irrationalities and biases of policy-makers themselves. This paper examines empirical examples and conceptual implications of this development.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a proliferation of academic work in recent years, which has examined the predictably irrational ways in which individuals make decisions and the implications of this for the development and delivery of public policy. To this end, 'nudging' has entered the political lexicon of the majority of states. A new trend, however, has emerged over the past two to three years. States and other organisations are beginning to use behavioural insights - not as a way of governing whole populations - but as a way of addressing the perceived irrationalities and biases of policy-makers themselves. Drawing on research conducted as part of a Leverhulme Fellowship, the paper examines empirical examples of this phenomenon in Wales, Scotland and the US. It also highlights the significant conceptual implications of this development for anthropological understandings of the state. Specifically, it discusses how such developments: 1) question the figure of the rational, objective, unbiased and emotionally-balanced policy-maker, which has long held sway in academic writings on the state and within state organisations themselves; 2) speak of an attempt to support the creation of a new kind of policy-maker (policy-maker 2.0) who is aware of their own cognitive and emotional limitations, and who is beginning to be armed with new skills and capacities required to support innovative, effective and democratic governance; 3) lead to ethical concerns linked to an inherent responsibilisation of individuals and an allied downplaying of the structural conditions that limit state actors' freedom to act.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the southern Gobi and engaging with debates around state presence/ absence and the relationship between legitimacy and 'stateness', this paper examines the extent to which mining companies fill a (perceived or real) governance gap in rural Mongolia.

Paper long abstract:

The Gobi desert in Mongolia has seen rapid development of extractive industries in recent years. This has resulted in dramatic changes both in the physical landscape of the Gobi region and in the economy of the Mongolian state. However, often overlooked is the changing spatialization of the state in this context of accelerated infrastructure investment. Drawing on fieldwork conducted around the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine in 2016 and 2018, and a series of gold, zinc, copper and coal mines in Gurvantes in 2018-19, this paper examines the extent to which mining companies are perceived have a responsibility to take on state-like roles. This expectation - expressed by local communities and local government - has its roots in the role of state-owned companies during the socialist period in terms of their provision of community services, infrastructure and jobs. In the contemporary period the persistence of these expectations, alongside significant gaps in government reach in rural Mongolia, has led to tensions regarding roles and responsibilities of often foreign-owned mining companies in relation to the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, and the production of environmental knowledge and expertise. Engaging with debates around state presence/ absence and the relationship between legitimacy and 'stateness', this paper examines the extent to which companies fill a (perceived or real) governance gap, the scalar differences between the expectations that communities, local government and national government has of companies, and how the power to regulate the legitimate use of natural resources is shifting in contemporary Mongolia.