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Roadsides Collection 002: Labor
Abstract
This second collection of Roadsides employs artistically rendered depictions of labor to show how infrastructures become political and material things through social relations of work. Aesthetically creative and methodologically experimental, the articles utilize photographs, paintings, cartoons, and videos to examine and reveal the impacts and experiences of technological intervention that sometimes escape the frame of textual analysis. Taking up the challenge of labor across a range of scales and places, the collection moves from Nepal and India’s Himalayan borderlands to the Paraguayan Chaco, downtown London to the deserts of Sudan, and urban Sri Lanka to Afghanistan’s Wakhan highlands to illustrate many of the inevitable cracks in the dreams of infrastructural pasts and futures
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Despite recent advances to create a robust body of international and domestic indigenous rights law, indigenous peoples' rights are increasingly under threat across the Americas. Amidst these challenges, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has become an important legal avenue to support indigenous territorial claims that communities use to seek redress for human rights violations. This article examines the implementation politics regarding two Enxet-Sur indigenous communities that received favorable rulings from the IACtHR. The judgments state that Paraguay must restitute land for the Enxet-Sur as reparations for the socioenvironmental injustices and human rights violations both communities have endured. However, land restitution is complicated by histories of indigenous dispossession and contemporary politics shaped by racist and classist logics that frame private property as a productive resource and indigenous peoples outside of production. Thus, I untangle the shifting forms of power, representation, and land control that accompany struggles over the IACtHR judgments and their implementation in Paraguay. I weave interdisciplinary and post-disciplinary legal geography scholarship together with theories of legal abandonment and an ethnography of Enxet-Sur resistance to argue that the politics of implementing IACtHR judgments in Paraguay produces spatial and temporal liminality that positions Enxet-Sur peoples as rights-bearing subjects who are subject to the abandonment of their rights. Employing the symbolic notion of the crossroads alongside an analysis of Enxet-Sur struggles for rights at a material crossroads, the article shows that legal abandonment is not always the end of political struggle and can be a site of political possibility where indigenous self-determination is changing the practice of human rights.
en What makes a place remote? Is remoteness a factor of geography and topography, is it a construct of connectivity, or is it an outcome of politics and history? For the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, inhabiting the Indo‐Tibetan borderlands, remote denotes multiple aspects: lack of material infrastructure and transport, improper communication and geographical isolation. Living an enclave existence far away from centres of commerce, governance and industry, Monpas consider themselves to be backward. Yet, Monyul, the traditional homeland of the Monpa communities, is of high strategic importance in the still unresolved India–China border conflict. Its present remoteness is woven into the politics of borders and frontiers. Through a focus on the particular history and politics of Monyul, I show how colonial and postcolonial policies transformed the region into a remote periphery. While infrastructure and connectivity can lead to the economic and political integration of a region, the withholding of the same makes a region appear remote. I bring the concept of selective connectivity to understand how road infrastructure is a particular form of exercising state control.
Accès sélectif ou la fabrication de l'isolement par les États
fr Qu'est‐ce qui rend un endroit isolé ou enclavé? L’éloignement est‐il un facteur de géographie et de topographie? S'agit‐il d'une construction mentale de connectivité ou le résultat de la politique et de l'histoire? Pour les Monpas de l'Arunachal Pradesh, dans le nord‐est de l'Inde, qui habitent dans les zones frontalières indo‐tibétaines, l’éloignement a de multiples formes: manque d'infrastructure matérielle et de transport, communication inadéquate et isolement géographique. Vivre une existence enclavée loin des centres de commerce, de gouvernance et d'industrie, les Monpas se considèrent comme arriérés. Pourtant, Monyul, la patrie traditionnelle des communautés Monpas, revêt une grande importance stratégique dans le conflit encore non résolu entre l'Inde et la Chine. Son éloignement actuel est intimement lié à la politique des frontières et des limites territoriales. Mettant l'accent sur l'histoire et la politique particulières de Monyul, je montre de quelle manière les politiques coloniales et postcoloniales ont transformé la région en une périphérie éloignée. L'infrastructure et la connectivité permettent d'aboutir à l'intégration économique et politique d'une région, mais le fait de ne pas les développer peut rendre une région en apparence isolée. Je m'appuie sur le concept de connectivité sélective pour comprendre de quelle façon l'infrastructure routière est une forme particulière de contrôle exercé par l’État.
Plantations are back. Colonial-style large scale corporate monoculture of industrial crops on concession land is again expanding in the global south. The biggest expansion is in Indonesia, where oil palm already cover 11 million hectares, and 10-20 million more hectares are planned, most of it in plantation style. The land dimensions of renewed plantation expansion were thrust into public debate in 2008-9, when there was a spike in transnational land-acquisitions widely described as a global land-grab. The polemical term "grab" usefully drew attention to what was being taken away: customary land rights, diverse farming systems, and ecological balance. Drawing on ethnographic research in the oil palm zone of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, this article examines what happens after the grab, highlighting the violence embedded in the material, social and political infrastructure that plantations install. Promises to reform plantations through regulation and certification ring hollow as law, government, and livelihoods are subordinated to plantation logics; a trajectory that worsens over time as plantation zones expand and become saturated, and everyone is locked in. Indonesia's plantations cannot be redeemed, hence they should not be expanded.