Evento

The Indian state’s preoccupation with infrastructure, especially in recent decades, has found its best expression in the border regions, northeast India being one. A region sharing more than 90% of its borders with other nations (namely, China, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Bangladesh), northeast India, which is also part of the fragile Eastern Himalayan landscape, is undergoing an infrastructure spree – roads and bridges, dams and embankments being some of the more prominent infrastructures. The state of Arunachal Pradesh, for instance, has witnessed a number of large hydroelectric projects in recent years, including the Lower Subansiri Dam, which, once completed, will be the largest hydroelectric project in the country. A similar process is unfolding in the state of Assam, too. Indeed, the entire region has been declared by the Government of India as the “future powerhouse” of the country due to its rich water resources. Accordingly, a series of large dams have been proposed for the region. While some of these infrastructures may have accrued economic gains to the state, more of than not, they have also produced disasters and deepened social vulnerability. This paper critically engages with the question of infrastructure in northeast India with a special focus on Majuli river island in Assam.

Located in the middle of the Brahmaputra River and believed to the largest river island in the world, Majuli has undergone enormous transformations over the course of the 20th century due to the twin processes of flooding and riverbank erosion. From a landmass of roughly 1255 sq. km. at the turn of the century, the island is reduced to less than half its size today. This has resulted in large-scale displacement and outmigration of the local population as well as a great loss of biodiversity and traditional livelihoods. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Baruah 2022), the crises facing Majuli are largely rooted in the hydraulic infrastructures, chiefly the embankments, that the state has built over the years to control flood and erosion. This paper, however, focuses on a new infrastructure – a large bridge over the mighty Brahmaputra, currently at the initial stage of construction – and the potential risks that it poses to the island and the ecologies of the Brahmaputra floodplains more broadly. This roughly 7 km. long bridge will connect Majuli with the mainland on the southern bank of the river. With an estimated US$ 125 million budget, work on this project began in 2021 and the Assam government has pledged to complete it within four years.

While many on the island have welcomed and celebrated this project, it has also created great anxiety among others who believe that the bridge will change the fluvial dynamics of the river forever, thereby deepening vulnerability of the islanders. Their fear is not unfounded, as infrastructures of similar kind have, in the past, rendered downstream communities in the Brahmaputra Valley much more susceptible to flood and erosion (ibid). Many people also fear that once the island is connected with the mainland by a bridge, its identity as an island will be in question. Some others expressed concern about disturbance to Majuli’s cultural sanctity (Majuli is the hub of the satras, a medieval era Neo-Vaishnavite monastery) and peaceful natural environment once it is accessible to outsiders by road. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in riverside villages in Majuli, this paper presents a political ecological account of the role of infrastructure in the re-making of Majuli and, by extension, the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. In doing so, the paper also engages with the social life of hydraulic infrastructures in Majuli.


Keywords: infrastructure, flood, riverbank erosion, Majuli, the Brahmaputra River, island.


Work cited:
Baruah, M. (2022). Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam. Taylor & Francis.

KEY WORDS: Mobility, uneven development, right to the city

The Mexican government’s ambitious Tren Maya megaproject is focused on the construction of a railway network that will interlink the major urban, industrial, and touristic centers of the Yucatan Peninsula. Despite its stated aim of “paying a historic debt” to the peoples of the region (FONATUR, Tren Maya), this infrastructure is not designed to solve the most pressing transportation needs of the population, such as inclusion and accessibility. Failure to improve the mobility of disadvantaged groups in the region is not a new phenomenon, or one exclusive to the Mayan Train. The Yucatan Peninsula has long been a space of social contrasts, as evidenced by the marginalization of the native Mayan population (Robles-Zavala, 2010). Unequal geographical development can be observed in the transportation dynamics of those communities located −both socially and geographically− at the peripheries of the process of capital accumulation. The logic behind this development model, based on free market ideals, allowed the private sector to compete with −or replace−the state.
These close links between local governments and the private sector are not circumscribed to this particular region. The austerity measures implemented in the Yucatan Peninsula in the last decades of the 20th century mirrored those adopted at the federal level. The imposition of neoliberal policies set the guideline for the limited participation that states and municipalities would play in their role as purveyors of common goods and services. In terms of public transportation, local governments reduced their involvement by granting bus concessions to the private sector, thus commodifying the mobility needs of the population. As travel shifted from a public right to a private service, motion and income entangled themselves further. This
regime of automobility that commodified public transit and incentivized the use of private vehicles in pursuit of profit (Culver, 2020), limited the mobility of vulnerable groups and curbed their right to the city.

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Against this historical background, the promotion of the Tren Maya megaproject seemed like a response to decades of neglect. With its promise to "improve the quality of life... and promote sustainable development" (FONATUR, Tren Maya), a picture was painted of a project that would benefit the entire population of the Yucatan Peninsula. Nevertheless, whilst the project purports to solve mobility problems in the region by overcoming spatial and temporal barriers, the Tren Maya does nothing more than develop infrastructure to expedite mobility between −and not within− urban centers. In the project’s implementation we can observe its objectives: it seeks to create a network that can interconnect the largest urban and productive centers of the Peninsula, with the aim of expediting the flow of people, labor, and capital between them. However, it does not consider the effects that the acceleration of mobility will have on the public services within cities it will connect, nor the repercussions it will have on the people who reside there.
The arrival of the Tren Maya to unequal urban spaces, such as the cities of the Yucatan Peninsula, foreshadows the acceleration of a dynamic that has, for the past three decades, exacerbated social precariousness. The confluence of the federal project with the current actions of local administrations is set to deepen marginalization and increase the strain on public transit systems that already suffer serious deficiencies. Private investment, with an eye on amassing more capital, will seek projects that commodify and exploit various public spaces and areas of life, while the governments of the region, in their efforts to entice investors, will seek to generate the necessary conditions for its arrival. In this way, the federal project that promises to rescue the economies of the Yucatan Peninsula and improve regional travel risks sacrificing local mobility and a people’s right to the city.
In view of this scenario, and with the intention of contributing to avoiding such an unfortunate outcome brought about by a development model that accentuates inequality, I will use this presentation as an opportunity to illustrate how the commodification of the right to access the city affects marginalized communities the most. Likewise, I will introduce some possible solutions and examples of initiatives that seek to reverse the exclusionary tendencies of this mobility regime; initiatives aimed at reinforcing inclusion and freedom of movement for all.

Indonesia is one of the countries with the most coal-fired capacity supported by Chinese financing from ‘Going out’ in the 2000s to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) since 2013. While the coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) have the objective to meet Indonesia’s increasing energy demand, especially from industrialization and urbanization, the projects have encountered resistance from local communities and civil society organizations due to land disputes, air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change, as well as health and economic impacts. Despite the commitment of ‘greening the BRI’ and the announcement in September 2021 that China will no longer build overseas CFPPs, the environmental and social impacts of the projects that are already planned, under construction or in operation are expected to remain. Based on a systematic mapping of 25 cases in the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) and 28 in-depth interviews, this paper provides a grounded analysis of Chinese investment in the coal-fired power sector in Indonesia from a comparative political ecology lens. It takes a bottom-up approach to make visible the environmental, health and socio-economic impact of CFPP projects under analysis and the power relations that led to ecological distribution conflicts. The paper sheds light on policy recommendations for the governance of China’s BRI from an environmental justice perspective. It also proposes a research agenda on the BRI that not only takes into consideration of the China-side perspective, but also the local political economy dynamics shaping the vision and frictions of a 'Green Belt and Road'.

This article explores ambivalent temporalities of mega-infrastructures as they unfold at material, symbolic, and affective intersections of state politics, mega-projects, and everyday life. Analysing politics of Lamu Port in coastal Kenya where I undertook research between 2019 and 2023, I explore how mega-infrastructures – once spectacular, violent, or resulting in anticipation – over time dissipate into more ambivalent affective dispositions of uncertainty. Although at its inception Lamu Port featured as central to state development strategies and local contestations that ensued as a response, with time and faltering project development goals, this infrastructure has receded into a material, symbolic, and affective background of contestations. Fishermen displaced by the port construction precariously adapt to new material conditions. The port itself, once deemed threatening to local livelihoods, or an anticipatory possibility of “development”, is overshadowed by changing state politics, political leadership, and political dramas that ensue. In this context, some actors start to question whether the project will materialise at all, articulating the lack of infrastructure development as more threatening than the port itself. Centering these dynamics, the article foregrounds an analytical value of studying infrastructure over time; specifically, how ambivalent temporalities of megaprojects demonstrate that infrastructure, once spectacular, disruptive, or anticipatory, recedes into the background, becoming one node within multiple layers of state-society relations, contestations, and everyday life. Doing this, the article reflects to what extent attention to “the new era of global infrastructure”, “transformative geographies of infrastructure across multiple scales”, or “politics of anticipation” that feature in critical geographical scholarship on mega-infrastructures can explain – or, in fact, at times might occlude – everyday material and affective textures of ambivalence, non-change, more-of-the-same within landscapes of mega-infrastructures.

Keywords: Palestine, Israel, China, circulation, commodities, diaspora

Alongside and through massive material growth and changes in global infrastructure around circulation and uneven territorial development, so too have place-specific forms of social and transnational identities been altered. This talk will discuss research in progress on emergent human and economic geographies between Palestine and China. Beginning in the 1990s with new political agreements and dynamics in Israel's territorial management of the West Bank market, bolstered by increased efficiencies in transport and changes in port management, and distributed in new ways because of market consolidation in China owing to the 2008 Olympics, Palestine's relationship to China and to Chinese commodities has changed significantly.

This talk is based on preliminary research conducted in 2015 and 2017 between Ramallah and Hebron in the West Bank; and Beijing, Shanghai, Yiwu, and Guangzhou in China. Throughout the West Bank over the last fifteen or more years, there has been discussion of the link between businessmen in Hebron and China. Everyone in Hebron is said to have a cousin or former classmate who has been to China. People suggest “there is a Khalil embassy in China;” there are “streets and streets” of Khalilis; and it is easier to find stuffed lamb neck, a particularly Hebronite dish, in China than in Ramallah. The first aspect of the fieldwork is an attempt to index those stories, and to try to understand how economic and political imperatives intertwine as matters of identity, social life, and geography. This work is the beginning of an approach that moves outward and toggles from the material to the abstract by looking at social, cultural, and mercantile relationships alongside the specifying functions of the Israeli state and colonial territorial imperatives. Trade in small commodities is a primary link between Palestinians in both places, and traders are daily navigating the economic parts of Israeli occupation; the circulation of goods, capital, and people begins to reveal geoeconomic and geopolitical phenomena that are co-constituted by forms of national and personal aspirations and identity.
For Palestinians in several Chinese cities, economic globalization and the mechanics of trade are important parts of the bridge over the distance of diaspora. This talk will seek to understand how, if distance is an essential part of how people recast diasporic formation and personal or national geographies of identity and belonging, then how are places inhabited, understood, and constructed when trade becomes a primary form of connection? It asks, what can this case study help illuminate about the particulars of the Israel/Palestine case and circulation and border regimes more broadly?