Labour Geography of the National Question in Times of Decolonisation: Sharecropper Politics in Western Punjab,c. 1945–1953

This article examines the labour geographies of nationalism through sharecropper “articulations” of anti-colonialism. I study the Punjab Kisan (peasant) Committee at the eve and dawn of Pakistan’s independence from British colonialism. I analyse their actions and claims through newsletters, activist memoirs, and colonial reports. I situate them in relation to other social and political forces: the state, landlords, and Muslim nationalists. Whereas labour geography has often ignored nationalism, I outline an approach for the sub-field to address this gap. First, subaltern nationalisms re-articulate labour, land, gender, and religion in place-specific ways. Second, exclusionary and liberatory nationalisms are variegated responses to the dynamics of being integrated to an imperialist world-economy. This study found these multi-religious peasant committees articulated sovereignty over labour, land, and social reproduction with the national question. Further, this article contributes to the subaltern and labour historiography of Pakistan.     

Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy,policy and institutions in Gramsci

Gramsci’s writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist–technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the ‘Gramscian tradition’ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci’s contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci’s writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci’s work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of ‘Gramscian tradition’ made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci’s specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsci’s early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates. Finally, in Part III, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsci’s insights amount to a theory of cultural policy.     

Police power in green: Furthering political ecologies of the state

The growth of wildlife and environmental crime has catalysed efforts to strengthen state policing to better exert control over activities, flows, and people that threaten states’ desired socio-ecological orders. The expanded role of policing in and over human-environment relations provokes conceptual and empirical imperatives to better centre policing in political ecology and political geography scholarship on state-environment relations. This article begins with the question of how political ecology might better account for and conceptualise policing power, and how doing so can help understand how, where, and through what practices and institutions states exercise power over socio-ecological relations. To capture the role of policing in exerting power and control over socio-ecological orders, this article brings together insights on critical theories of police power, conservation power and state power to develop the concept of police power in green. I argue that police power in green grounds the mechanisms through which state power is exerted over socio-ecological relations in ways that reflect a broader strengthening of state power. I use multi-scalar and ethnographic research to examine three processes that extend and expand police power in green, and related state power. These are: 1) expanding conservation law and criminality beyond conservation spaces to national territory; 2) creating new environmental police bodies; 3) strengthening and expanding traditional policing, enforcement and criminal justice institutions. I end by outlining how police power in green can connect and further critical scholarship on political ecologies of the state and broader debates on policing, the green state and state power.     

The political geography of macro-level turnout in American political development

Aggregate turnout rates are among the central indicators of democratic performance in the American polity. Despite the considerable implications of macro turnout, however, most studies of turnout focus instead on the micro level. As a consequence, we know little about how local, political, and historical influences have impacted turnout over the course of American political development. The result is a somewhat impoverished conception of turnout that often removes the political from political participation. In this article, I argue for a new, macro-level perspective that highlights the political dimension of turnout by placing turnout in the local political settings in which it has taken place. I contrast two competing explanations of macro turnout variation across local electorates, a political account and Elazar's cultural thesis, and discuss their implications for the political geography of macro turnout in American electoral history. I then examine this political geography by employing a local indicator of spatial association (a LISA statistic) to identify the spatial structuring of macro turnout in the United States from 1828 through 2000. I demonstrate that a political perspective provides greater leverage than Elazar's cultural perspective in explaining the political geography of macro turnout in the United States.     

Land,Law and Courts in India: Tracing Land Rights Debates through Processes of Judicial Decision Making

The pace of industrial and allied infrastructure development in India is encumbered by scarcity in the supply of land. As a result, the state in India has frequently resorted to expropriation of land through conversion of land away from its traditional uses and through displacement of communities. Consequently, land acquisition in the country is mired in disputes over human rights and environmental rights violations. In the face of continued political support for infrastructure‐led development in India, those who stand to lose their land have often resorted to judicial recourse for pressing their rights. This article draws on empirical evidence from court cases related to two urban development projects in the states of Karnataka and Kerala to examine how courts have responded to the question of violation of land rights and appeals against land acquisition for the two projects. The author argues that the courts, while responding to the claims against the two projects, have refrained from holding the implementing agencies or the state governments accountable even in cases where there were recognizable incidents of malfeasance. The article illustrates that the inability of the courts to confront the state lends a tacit assent to the development agenda of the state.     

Territorially-nested urbanization in China - the case of Dongguan

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the question of extended urbanization by arguing for the need to overcome dualistic views to properly address the political specificities of urbanization in China. To this end, this paper understands state-territorial relations as a process of étatization by drawing on the particular literature on the role of the party-state in urbanization. Through a brief history of Guangdong, it elaborates on the political modalities of territorialization through China’s administrative rank system. This has enabled the party-state to mediate the production of urban space. From this, I arrive at the concept of “territorially-nested urbanization”, moving beyond limited accounts of hierarchical state powers in Chinese urban studies. Next, from a short periodization of Dongguan’s urbanization, the paper exemplifies how a particular mode of territorialization has evolved into tense relationships between the city and towns in the ongoing dilemma of multi-centered versus concentrated direction of urbanization. Based on insights from in-depth fieldwork, the last part of this paper illustrates the contradictory mobilization of village collectives within extended state power through local government, and the development of villagers’ politics and activism in contested land transformations.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

Resources,regulation and the state: Struggles over gas extraction and passive revolution in Evo Morales's Bolivia

The indigenous-influenced policies of Evo Morales's Bolivia represent arguably the most important attempt to improve the socioenvironmental implications of resource extraction in recent years, reasserting the role of the state and social movements against ‘corporate-led governance’. In this paper, through combining the regulation approach with neo-Gramscian state theory, I carry out a conceptually informed analysis of struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Bolivia, in order to shed light on the reasons why such an ambitious political project has largely failed to realise its transformative potential. I make two interrelated arguments. First, initial, important advances in the governance of resources in Bolivia were later partially reversed, due to shifting power relations between social movements, the hydrocarbon industry, and the state. This points to the need of understanding resource governance and its changes as reflecting or ‘condensing’ shifting power relationships among social forces. Second, the coming to power of Evo Morales resulted in a ‘passive-revolutionary’ process whereby an initial radical break with the neoliberal order was followed by a gradual adaptation to pre-existing political economic relations and arrangements. Most notably, plans to reduce the country's dependency on gas exports as well as to challenge the transnational domination of the hydrocarbon sector were abandoned, generating an increasingly explicit incompatibility with indigenous demands. I conclude that neo-Gramscian theory offers important insights that enable us to advance our conceptualisation of the state in resource governance research and in political ecology more generally.     

Infrastructure Nation: State Space,Hegemony, and Hydraulic Regionalism in Pakistan

Large‐scale infrastructures are often understood by state planners as fulfilling a national integrative function. This paper challenges the idea of infrastructures as national integrators by engaging theories of state/nation formation and infrastructure in a postcolonial context. Specifically, I put Lefebvre's characterization of the production of state space as a homogenization‐differentiation dialectic in conversation with Gramsci's understanding of hegemony, bureaucracy, and nationalism to analyze the controversy surrounding the giant Tarbela Dam in Pakistan in the 1960s. I use the Tarbela controversy as a case study to elaborate a theory of postcolonial nation‐formation through state‐led infrastructural projects. I argue that in a postcolonial context the failure to articulate a hegemonic nationalist ideology to accompany the production of large‐scale infrastructure results in a fragmentation of state space in some ways, even as state space is homogenized and integrated in other ways. The paper also offers a “hydraulic lens” on the politics of regionalism in Pakistan.     

The India-Iran-Pakistan Triad: Comprehending the Correlation of Geo-economics and Geopolitics

Historically, India’s policy on Iran has been a balancing act between securing its interests as a counterweight to Pakistan, and ensuring its continued partnership with the US and other regional players. Yet confusion in India’s Iran policy became evident when Iran’s nuclear program began to draw international attention in the 1990s. More recently, India has attempted to reach out to Iran, reigniting trade relations and initiating new plans. Growing Indo-Iran relations are however a worrying sign for Islamabad, which is attempting a simultaneous expansion of ties with Tehran while continuing to resolve outstanding disputes. The central argument of this paper is that India’s relations with Iran are best understood through the prism of the intertwining of geo-economic and geopolitical considerations. Analysis has often separated these two factors, but there is evidence that a synergy exists – and that it is particularly visible when the Pakistani element is introduced. Often emphasising historical and cultural affinity, India and Pakistan have each sought politically and economically viable relations with Iran. Yet their bilateral political calculations and the current economic challenges have prompted a nuanced policy based on a careful balancing of geo-economics and geopolitics.     

Cultural censorship in defective democracy: the South Korean blacklist case

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand the cultural censorship practiced in contemporary South Korea, a liberal democracy, where cultural quangos were established after political democratization, following the arm’s length model. I will focus on the analysis of cases from the film industry which has been central to the censorship debate historically in Korea because of its popular appeal. The establishment of arm’s length cultural organizations laid the foundation for freedom of cultural expression which had been seriously curtailed under military rule. However, recent revelations of cultural blacklist cases under the two previous administrations are baffling to understand since rampant political censorship was practiced through ostensibly autonomous cultural organizations. The paper examines the ways in which the state constructed a ‘system of ideological censorship’ by using not only cultural quangos but non-cultural state apparatuses. In so doing, the paper emphasizes the role of non-cultural policy state institutions in the operation of cultural policy and the effect of state systems on cultural organizations. I draw upon the concept of defective democracy to understand the socio-political condition where these cultural organizations exist.     

Technospatial imaginaries: Masud Rana and the vernacularization of popular Cold War geopolitics in East Pakistan, 1966–1971

Abstract

The cold war in East Pakistan was intimately connected with nationalism and nation-building. One of the central aspects of such nation-building was the articulation of a new sense of national territoriality. Technology was central to these attempts to radically reimagine space. This is what I call technospatiality. Material, political and symbolic resources of the cold war were mobilized in the production of these new technospatialities. Popular cold war geopolitics engendered in cultural productions such as the James Bond films were creatively vernacularized to produce new, nationally useful technospatial imaginaries. In this article I look at how Kazi Anwar Hussain’s hugely successful spy-thrillers articulated this new technospatial imaginaries by drawing upon and reworking contemporary technopolitical objects, projects and anxieties.     

Space agents: anti‐racist feminism and the politics of scale in Turin,Italy

This article discusses racialized politics among women in Turin, Italy, utilizing and expanding Neil Smith's concept of the spatial politics of scale specifically in relation to an anti‐racist organization, Alma Mater, that emerged during the early 1990s. International migration is relatively recent in Italy, and popular responses over the past decade have been both supportive and hostile. Overt and implicit expressions of racism and intolerance toward migrants have become apparent throughout the country. Migrant and Italian women have retaliated by engaging in a politics of space and scale to effect local and national labor and cultural practices. Through an examination of every day cultural–ideological practices and their links to broad political and economic processes I examine the relative success of Alma Mater in its ability to challenge scales and add to an understanding of the social production and reproduction of power relations at all scales.     

Rethinking Land Struggle in the Postindustrial City

The racial and cultural politics of land and property are central to urban struggle, but have received relatively little attention in geography. This paper analyzes land struggles in Detroit where over 100,000 parcels of land are classified as “vacant”. Since 2010, planners and government officials have been developing controversial plans to ruralize Detroit's “vacant” neighborhoods as part of a program of fiscal austerity, reigniting old questions of racialized dispossession, sovereignty, and struggles for liberation. This paper analyzes these contentious politics by examining disputes over a white businessman's proposal to build the world's largest urban forest in the center of a Black majority city. I focus on how residents, urban farmers, and community activists resisted the project by making counterclaims to vacant land as an urban commons. They argued that the land is inhabited not empty and that it belonged to those who labored upon and suffered for it. Combining community‐based ethnography with insights from critical property theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory, I argue that land struggles in Detroit are more than distributional conflicts over resources. They are inextricable from debates over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird modern liberal democracies and ongoing struggles for decolonization.     

Decentralization,the State and Conflicts over Local Boundaries in Northern Ghana

Decentralization projects, such as that initiated by the Rawlings government in Ghana at the end of the 1980s, create a political space in which the relations between local political communities and the state are re‐negotiated. In many cases, the devolution of power intensifies special‐interest politics and political mobilization aiming at securing a ‘larger share of the national cake’, that is, more state funds, infrastructure and posts for the locality. To legitimate their claims vis‐à‐vis the state, civic associations (‘hometown’ unions), traditional rulers and other non‐state institutions often invoke some form of ‘natural’ solidarity, and decentralization projects thus become arenas of debate over the boundaries of community and the relationship between ‘local’ and national citizenship. This article analyses one such debate, in the former Lawra District of Ghana's Upper West Region, where the creation of new districts provoked protracted discussions, among the local political elite as well as the peasants and labour migrants, about the connections between land ownership and political authority, the relations between the local ethnic groups (Dagara and Sisala), and the relevance of ethnic versus territorial criteria in defining local citizenship.     

Military dominance in Pakistan and China–Pakistan relations

ABSTRACT

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been touted as the centrepiece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the key to its strategic partnership with Pakistan. Notwithstanding claims about the CPEC’s economic potential, however, Islamabad’s economy continues to be dire. This article attempts to better understand the ramifications of Pakistan’s economic viability and its consequences for China. It does so by examining China–Pakistan relations from the lens of Pakistan’s civil–military relations, paying attention in particular to what the Pakistan Armed Forces (PMA)’s domestic dominance means for China’s interests, including economic interests, in Pakistan. We suggest that PMA preponderance and its attendant influence on the country’s economic performance bring another dimension to interpreting Sino-Pakistani relations. As Beijing’s most trusted political partner in Pakistan, the PMA’s local dominance has considerable benefits for China, particularly in the security and political aspects of its interests. However, this dominance also entails a number of complications for Chinese economic interests, a factor that has implications for the future of China’s CPEC investments and their financial sustainability.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

The Taliban,Public Space,and Terror in Pakistan

Two UK-based specialists on terrorism in Pakistan use empirical evidence to document and analyze the Pakistani Taliban's (Tehrik-e-Taliban) practice of targeting spaces of public interaction for terrorism intended to suppress expressions of public unity and restrict venues for open discussion. In tracing the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan, the authors review the country's history of state and civil society formation, its relations with Afghanistan, and U.S. and Western policy in the region. The authors present timely information and insights that enhance understanding of the recent surge in terrorist attacks on civilians in Pakistan and its ties to the eastward spread of conflict from neighboring Afghanistan.     

Betting on Potatoes: Accumulation in Times of Agrarian Crisis in Punjab,India

Despite the widespread consensus that neoliberal India is reeling under an overarching agrarian crisis, this article argues that at least some capitalist farmers are continuing to accumulate and are thereby contributing to the process of class differentiation. Through a study of potato-growing capitalist farmers in Punjab, the archetypal Green Revolution state of India, the author shows that such farmers can navigate complex production and market processes to make profits. However, risks of volatile prices and land and credit markets have made capital accumulation more uncertain. While potato is a minor crop in Punjab and the case cannot be generalized, it brings into focus both under-explored non-state actors and processes in the state, and important tendencies of change since the plateauing of Green Revolution technologies. The analysis also highlights the agency of such farmers in negotiating a transformed political economy context, including the presence of corporate agribusinesses.