Dams,Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal-political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when “under the radar”. These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin.     

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.     

Tracing Process to Performance of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Case Study of Federal Hydropower Licensing

Despite collaborative governance's popularity, whether collaboration improves policy performance remains uncertain. This study assesses the link between collaborative decision making and licensed environmental management protocols in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC's) process for licensing hydropower facilities in the United States. Using results from a previous study of FERC relicensing (Ulibarri, forthcoming), one high‐, one medium‐, and one low‐collaboration case were selected. Using documents including meeting minutes, public comments, and issued licenses, I assessed collaboration and license outputs, then conducted process tracing to examine whether and how differences in collaboration produced differences in license quality. High collaboration resulted in jointly developed and highly implementable operating regimes designed to improve numerous resources, while low collaboration resulted in operating requirements that ignored environmental concerns raised by stakeholders and lacked implementation provisions. These results support the hypothesis that collaboration can improve environmental outcomes, revealing the pragmatic value of collaboration. [Correction added on 13 January 2015, after first online publication: the occurrences of ‘0’ in the abstract were erroneous and have now been corrected.]     

A feminist-phenomenology of women’s activism against hydropower plants in Turkey’s Eastern Black Sea region

Taking a feminist-phenomenological perspective of the body, this article provides an empirically grounded analysis of the embodied subjectivity of women in the movement against hydropower plants (HPPs) in the culturally and spatially specific context of the Eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Informed by a feminist engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of ‘the body-subject’, ‘the flesh’ and Einfühlung, the article places subjectivity within a relational ontology of sentience and intelligence in which corporeal experiences, senses and affects condition cognitive and agential processes. Bodily senses and affects are thus treated as media of subjectivity. The relationship between water and identity, established through memory, heritage and history, is also produced and/or conserved by the embodied relation between women’s bodies and bodies of water, within the connective ‘flesh’ of the physical world. The case of the Eastern Black Sea demonstrates how political subjectivity of women in the movement against HPPs is conditioned by an intimate embodied relationship with river waters that is sustained by a series of sensory-affective experiences. Their statements emphasize, over and over again, an interconnectedness with the rivers, which makes the cause of anti-HPP struggle vital and urgent for them. This feeling of urgency is a source of women’s radicalism in opposing HPPs. The article maintains the female subject as embodied and transversal, and stresses the centrality of corporeal experience, sense and affect in formation of political subjectivity. By developing a body-centred feminist-phenomenological approach to political subjectivity, it introduces a novel way of analysing women’s activisms within and beyond environmental movements.     

“A handshake across the Himalayas:” Chinese investment,hydropower development,and state formation in Nepal

Abstract

This article examines contemporary patterns of Chinese infrastructure development in Nepal’s Rasuwa District and the ways in which Nepali actors engage with Chinese investments to advance projects of state formation. Particularly in the wake of political volatility and natural disaster, Chinese interventions support the material and imaginative projects of a Nepalese state seeking stability, security, and economic growth. Long perceived as peripheral to the state center, Rasuwa is rapidly becoming central to Sino-Nepal relations, particularly in the context of bilateral investments in hydropower and transportation infrastructure. Drawing on data generated from 30 months of fieldwork in Nepal, we argue that Chinese development in Rasuwa: a) undergirds territorializing practices of the Nepalese state; b) represents a “gift of development” that connects Nepali ambitions of bikas (development) with Chinese anxieties over exile Tibetan populations; and c) reflects a strategic reorientation of geopolitical alliances between Nepal, China, and India. Challenging studies that depict Chinese development as an overwhelming extractive force, we instead show how small states like Nepal in fact use Chinese interventions to advance domestic projects of state formation and national security at home. On the basis of this study, we expand understandings about the place and priority of infrastructure in national state-making agendas, illustrate uneven local experiences with international development interventions, and highlight new configurations of Chinese investment and development abroad – characterized in Nepal as a “handshake across the Himalayas.”     

湖北十堰潘口水电站三处古遗址的发掘

潘口水电站与陕南和川东接壤,是古庸国所在地.遗址地处河流边缘地带,长年受河水的冲刷,破坏殆尽,出土遗物甚少,文化内涵主要包含新石器晚期和东周时期遗存.东周时期文化面貌较为复杂,既有楚文化特征又具巴蜀文化风格,同时还包含陕南文化因素,这种多元文化因素,是与周边文化相互影响、碰撞形成的一种以地方文化为特色的多元文化.因此,我们认为潘口水电站淹没区的小府坪、红花湾、王家套等遗址是东周时期楚灭庸后的一处村落遗址.     

Interrogating Power: Engaged Energy Anthropology

Human-induced global threats are compelling many anthropologists to rethink roles, methods, and paradigms and engage in public debate and action on energy policies, extraction processes, commodity chains, and consumption. Laura Nader's Energy Reader embodies her decades-long engagement as a catalyst for public debate on U.S. energy issues. Tanja Winther's Impact of Electricity exemplifies ethnography informing development practice. Strauss and colleagues’ Cultures of Energy reflects diverse approaches seeking to build cultural understandings to inform energy choices. There remains a need for collaboration with anthropologists embedded in energy-related agencies—positioned where they can leverage anthropological knowledge to push policy envelopes.     

“丰满水电站”的殖民动机与客观效果

伪满洲国水力电气建设局及伪满洲电业株式会社修建的丰满水电站,同时也为日本全面掠夺中国东北地区的各种资源,提供了动力基础与工具。本文从规划与设置机构、设计与施工、工程投资与质量、奴役与压榨劳工、垄断与掠夺资源等几个层面,对伪满洲国时期的吉林丰满水电站进行了剖析。无论是从丰满水电站修建的历史过程,还是从主要动机及客观效果来看,这一水利工程都充分反映了日本企图长期霸占中国东北地区的侵略野心。     

The contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in the Mekong River basin

Since the 1990s, many large hydropower dams have been built in the Mekong River Basin. There has been considerable concern about resettlement and compensation linked to reservoir flooding, as well as the impacts of dams on wild-capture fisheries, riparian livelihoods, and aquatic biodiversity and ecosystems. Anti-dam activists in the Mekong Basin have contested these impacts by claiming that dam impact assessments limit the spatial scale of recognized impact areas in order to reduce both the political backlash against projects and the costs of dam development. In this article, we consider the contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in order to understand how the spatial strategies of anti-dam activists influence the recognized scale of dam impacts. We analyze three of the most contested hydropower projects in the Mekong River Basin: the operational Pak Mun dam in northeastern Thailand, the recently completed Lower Sesan 2 dam in northeastern Cambodia, and the planned Sambor dam on the mainstream Mekong River in Cambodia. We argue that the recognized scale of impacts is in part an outcome of anti-dam activists’ different spatial imaginaries and associated scale frames—along with those of state actors, business interests, and project consultants—that inform activist strategies for mobilizing geographically dispersed people to make claims about dam impacts. Although activists have sometimes challenged the spatial extent of project impact assessments, they have also sometimes inadvertently adopted strategies to contest dams that have reproduced project scale frames favorable to dam proponents.     

China's Energy Security: Challenges and Priorities

In a companion paper to the essays comparing China's and India's economic rise (Prime, 2009) as well as India's energy security (Dadwal, 2009), two specialists on China's energy industries review the country's challenges posed by the need to dramatically increase energy use in order to support economic growth while coping with pressures to reduce environmental impacts from emissions of greenhouse gases. After reviewing the current mix of fuels in the economy and discussing each major energy resource (in terms of proven reserves, production, consumption, and foreign import requirements), the authors focus on measures undertaken by the Chinese government and corporations to improve access to vital supplies. The paper covers efforts to enhance the country's energy security, which include diversifying sources of oil supply, purchasing oil and gas concessions and financing of energy infrastructure development in African and Central Asian countries, instituting reforms to encourage more efficient energy use, and developing alternative energy sources. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O130, P280, Q400. 7 figures, 2 tables, 82 references.