Davide Chinigò | Università per Stranieri di Perugia (original) (raw)
Papers by Davide Chinigò
Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Volume 2
Annales d'Ethiopie
This article explores the “agrarian question of labour” (AQ of labour) that is emerging in Ethiop... more This article explores the “agrarian question of labour” (AQ of labour) that is emerging in Ethiopia as part of a strategy of agricultural commercialisation present since the mid-2000s. We contribute to debates about the uneven character and open-ended trajectory of Ethiopia’s agrarian transformation, which is a state-led, investmentbased attempt at a transition from a largely rural, agrarian society and economy to an increasingly industrial one. The article addresses why and how agricultural commercialisation failed in the case of two overlapping and nearly identical agricultural investment projects in Hararghe and Wolaita that were financed by interlinked multinational financial groups and facilitated by the state for the production and processing of the biofuel crop castor. The state’s contractual incorporation of smallholders into these poorly planned and financially extractive large-scale land investments was met with various forms of resistance which contributed to the failure ...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter addresses the case of a failed commercialization scheme in Wolaita, SNNP region. Und... more This chapter addresses the case of a failed commercialization scheme in Wolaita, SNNP region. Under the impulse of global capital to produce fuel from renewable sources, and in the context of a changing government strategy oriented to allow injections of foreign investments in agriculture for the first time since the 1970s, commercialization schemes for the production of biofuel crops were attempted in Wolaita for about a decade beginning in the mid-2000s. Empirically the chapter addresses the practices of subversion, manoeuvring, and differentiation that farmers performed in the context of poorly planned and exploitative commercialization schemes. The chapter discusses the ways Wolaita contract farmers attempted to re-establish and secure access to means of social reproduction, after commercialization proved unsuccessful. Farmers’ claims to recognition are expressed here in relation to the symbolic and material values of the land, in a context of profound social and economic uncert...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter discusses the labour dynamics that have been emerging within a rapidly growing textil... more The chapter discusses the labour dynamics that have been emerging within a rapidly growing textile global value chain in Tigray’s capital city Mekelle since the mid-2010s. In the context of an ambitious industrialization policy urged to sustain export-led economic growth, reduce dependency on agriculture and services, and to address pressing political problems such as rising urban unemployment, the Ethiopian government managed to attract global production networks around newly established industrial poles, primarily geared towards manufacturing. Due to a number of historical, political, and geographical factors, by the mid-2010s Tigray was at the forefront of this development. The rapid consolidation of the textile industry in the area around Mekelle generated a new labour question: the coexistence of labour shortage around the textile industrial hub and a large population seeking employment. Empirically the chapter discusses the stories of young workers and trainees navigating text...
Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to... more Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to our conceptualization of state formation in Africa at a time in which the continent witnesses profound social and political transformations inscribed in increasingly globalized and localized dynamics. The book revisits key theories of the state, adopting a detailed empirical approach that studies how state power operates in the everyday. It locates the mutual constitution of state and society in the wide set of scalar processes that articulate how state power structures social life and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for new openings and social formations. Drawing on five qualitative fieldworks in Ethiopia between 2006 and 2018, the book identifies some important challenges that the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has encountered in institutionalizing power through the developmental state, an ambitious model of state-mediated econo...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter situates the problematic of this book alongside ongoing discussions in African studie... more The chapter situates the problematic of this book alongside ongoing discussions in African studies around methodological nationalism—the tendency of theory to restrict the analytical scope of social and political change against the lens of the nation-state—and descriptive empiricism—the tendency of theory to provide cultural explanations of state power by reifying micro empirical realities. It contends that the lens of the everyday allows for an empirical approach to map the mutual, and yet largely undetermined, constitution of state and society over time, departing from depictions of state formation in Africa that rely on meta-historical narrations, as well as the reification of micro analyses that have little scope for generalization. The chapter interrogates the everyday state by engaging with questions about the temporality of state formation, the spatial configurations of state-society relations, and the problem of subject formation in relation to state power. In particular, it...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter discusses the case of a resettlement programme in Waag Himra (Amhara region) that th... more This chapter discusses the case of a resettlement programme in Waag Himra (Amhara region) that the Ethiopian government implemented in the course of the 2000s. Intended to relocate rural households to less densely populated areas for humanitarian purposes, the programme entailed an increased deployment of the state apparatus in rural areas under a new political impulse on productivism. While the programme generated considerable initial expectations—despite the controversial legacy of resettlement during the Derg—most beneficiaries returned home within months after facing conflict, drought, and a lack of basic infrastructure. The chapter describes the ways in which returnees tried to make the most of limited opportunities, diversify risk, and reconstitute themselves as social, economic, and political subjects. Resettlers tried to navigate the limited opportunities offered by the programme facing significant strains both in the relocation sites and then when they returned home. The ch...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter discusses the promotion of entrepreneurship schemes in Kolfe Keranyo, one peri-urban ... more The chapter discusses the promotion of entrepreneurship schemes in Kolfe Keranyo, one peri-urban sub-city of Addis Ababa. Against a context in which, towards the end of the 2000s, addressing unemployment in rapidly expanding urban centres became an urgent political and economic priority, the Ethiopian government implemented a comprehensive policy of job creation relying on the promotion micro and small enterprises. Empirically the chapter discusses the practices through which young entrepreneurs manoeuvred the few opportunities mobilized by these schemes, such as access to credit, to perform other side and informal businesses that allowed them to make up for their social and economic reproduction which state-mandated enterprises were not able to deliver. The political subject is mobilized here through a subtle and quite sophisticated performance of power. Entrepreneurs diverted time and resources from state-mandated enterprises because the formal businesses they were asked to enrol ...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This concluding chapter summarizes and articulates the findings of the book’s five empirical chap... more This concluding chapter summarizes and articulates the findings of the book’s five empirical chapters along two main themes. The first is that the everyday offers a privileged perspective to study the complex scalar dynamics within which trajectories of state formation in contemporary Africa are enmeshed. This allows us to circumvent the problem of methodological nationalism by attending those histories that challenge meta-narration of state formation. The problem of scale thus requires putting under critical scrutiny how scholarship constructs scale as a research object, emphasizing the power field that specific categorization, such as ‘global’, ‘national’, and ‘local’, necessarily mobilize. The second theme is that a focus on the problem of subjection offers the opportunity to study how state power forms the political subject through practices of recognition and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for a radically conditioned identity without resorting to cultura...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter discusses the implementation of a national programme of rural land registration in S... more This chapter discusses the implementation of a national programme of rural land registration in Siraro, Oromia region, that was introduced in the mid 2000s. Motivated by concerns over increasing the productivity of smallholder agriculture, the capitalization of land, and the uncapping of land rental markets, the programme was implemented as part of an ambitious set of policy reforms providing for the decentralization of service delivery and resource management from central to local government. Empirically the chapter discusses the set of practices and tactics of manoeuvring land registration, which local government officials and farmers performed to tackle insecurity, conflict, uncertainty, and the ensuing threat of dispossession that came with the programme. The chapter discusses the ways in which Oromo farmers, against a long and controversial history of exploitative land relations, reconstituted material and symbolic values to the land after land registration threatened their soc...
We explore the notion of “sacrifice zones” to reflect critically on the trade-offs between Scienc... more We explore the notion of “sacrifice zones” to reflect critically on the trade-offs between Science & Technology (S&T) policy and inclusive development in South Africa. We draw evidence from one of the country’s flagship projects, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, currently under construction in the semi-arid Northern Cape. The SKA embodies a key tension in the country’s S&T policy, that between the promotion of astronomy, based on national and global priorities (the development of science), and the advancement of local development concerns (science for development), in which the dominant assumption is that local interests are either subsumed or superseded by national and global public goods. Given the extent to which the priorities of local residents have been overlooked in the name of the greater good, we argue that a fruitful way of recasting this relationship is to regard the region around the telescope as astronomy’s terrestrial “sacrifice zone”; this opens up an...
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 2018
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2019
Historians and social scientists of southern Africa have been slow to engage with what is undoubt... more Historians and social scientists of southern Africa have been slow to engage with what is undoubtedly the region's most ambitious investment in 'big science' in the new millennium: the radio astronomy project of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the core site of which is located in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa (see Figure 1). Yet this mega-project, the immediate origins of which date back to the intersecting millennial moments of intense globalisation and democratic transition in South Africa, should be of considerable interest for scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Intended to probe fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, 1 the SKA raises significant conceptual, theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges for those concerned with social and environmental dynamics on Earth, across different scales and registers of analysis. Issues include understanding the project's national and regional geo-political implications, its local social and environmental impacts and the contestations they are engendering, as well as its global importance on the frontiers of scientific knowledge; the project also raises profound questions about human agency and modes of knowing, meaning-making and representation. That the core site of this endeavour is located in the Karoo, at once the historic heartland of the devastating encounter between white settlers and indigenous Khoisan groups in the colonial period and today one of the country's most marginal regions, adds a sharp political edge to critical engagements with the unfolding of this project in South Africa. Within the African continent more broadly, the SKA is tightly tied to South Africa's conception of itself as a modernising, developmental state and leading continental power. It is also core to wider ambitions to reshape Africa's relationship to global science. Once completed, the full Array is projected to reach into a further eight African countries, most but not all located in southern Africa:
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2019
The establishment of an astronomy reserve around the core site of the Square Kilometre Array radi... more The establishment of an astronomy reserve around the core site of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope marks the beginning of an epochal shift away from commercial sheep farming in the upper Karoo. In this article, I reflect on the significance of this 'astronomy revolution' by exploring the ways in which land is central to dynamics of identification, shaping social hierarchies and development expectations. The article uses archival and ethnographic sources to explore the case of Carnarvon. It contextualises the current land-use change to astronomy in the social history of the town, addressing the set of events that marked an earlier epochal change: the transition from communal to commercial sheep farming, often called the 'merino revolution'. The history of land alienation accompanying this earlier transition resurfaces in current claims lodged through the post-apartheid land restitution programme, which intersect in complex ways with the current land-use change to astronomy. The article identifies a central tension in the 'astronomy revolution', which undermines claims to redress local historical inequalities while promoting identification with a broader national and global development priority.
Africa, 2019
By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this a... more By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this article explores the dynamic and inconclusive negotiation of state authority in Kolfe Keraniyo, peri-urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the last few years, Ethiopia embarked on a strategy of rapid transformation driven by what its political elite defined as a ‘developmental state’, which entailed the significant rescaling of the peri-urban space. The promotion of micro and small enterprises is an important aspect of the territorialization of state power in the peri-urban space, and is actively negotiated, challenged and refashioned. The first part of the article presents three central aspects of such projects: the policy of regularization and legalization; the notion of ‘group first’ or collective participation in the country's development; and the emphasis on ‘saving first’ to create micro-dynamics of capital accumulation. The second part of the article discusses how the beneficiaries o...
Third World Quarterly, 2018
The article poses questions about astronomy and its local, national and global developmental impa... more The article poses questions about astronomy and its local, national and global developmental impacts, drawing on ongoing research around the internationally networked Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope in South Africa. The relationship between progress in global science and technology and societal change has traditionally been framed through western-centric notions of progress imbued with universalism; the field of astronomy exemplifies this approach, with its assumptions of an inherently positive correlation between its science and loosely defined notions of 'development'. We problematise this assumption through an analysis of the multiple notions of development at different scales of analysis in the SKA. We argue that large astronomy projects such as the SKA are best understood as dense assemblages of science, infrastructure, human agency and politics, in which historically rooted local concerns are marginalised in the name of the national or global public interest.
Contested Extractivism, Society and the State, 2017
This chapter explores the complexities of contemporary market-driven land reform in Malawi throug... more This chapter explores the complexities of contemporary market-driven land reform in Malawi through the case of the Community Based Rural Land Development Project. By discussing the stories of beneficiaries returning home shortly after the project’s inception, this chapter critically analyses the politics of resettlement underpinning land reform. I argue that the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ model, while driven by the strong ethos of formalizing the rural economy, at the same time creates inequalities in resource access and social exclusion. The chapter concludes that market-driven land redistribution projects involve a broader restructuring of political power and authority, without extinguishing the functions of existing institutions governing land.
Movements in Ethiopia, Ethiopia in Movement. Volume 2
Annales d'Ethiopie
This article explores the “agrarian question of labour” (AQ of labour) that is emerging in Ethiop... more This article explores the “agrarian question of labour” (AQ of labour) that is emerging in Ethiopia as part of a strategy of agricultural commercialisation present since the mid-2000s. We contribute to debates about the uneven character and open-ended trajectory of Ethiopia’s agrarian transformation, which is a state-led, investmentbased attempt at a transition from a largely rural, agrarian society and economy to an increasingly industrial one. The article addresses why and how agricultural commercialisation failed in the case of two overlapping and nearly identical agricultural investment projects in Hararghe and Wolaita that were financed by interlinked multinational financial groups and facilitated by the state for the production and processing of the biofuel crop castor. The state’s contractual incorporation of smallholders into these poorly planned and financially extractive large-scale land investments was met with various forms of resistance which contributed to the failure ...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter addresses the case of a failed commercialization scheme in Wolaita, SNNP region. Und... more This chapter addresses the case of a failed commercialization scheme in Wolaita, SNNP region. Under the impulse of global capital to produce fuel from renewable sources, and in the context of a changing government strategy oriented to allow injections of foreign investments in agriculture for the first time since the 1970s, commercialization schemes for the production of biofuel crops were attempted in Wolaita for about a decade beginning in the mid-2000s. Empirically the chapter addresses the practices of subversion, manoeuvring, and differentiation that farmers performed in the context of poorly planned and exploitative commercialization schemes. The chapter discusses the ways Wolaita contract farmers attempted to re-establish and secure access to means of social reproduction, after commercialization proved unsuccessful. Farmers’ claims to recognition are expressed here in relation to the symbolic and material values of the land, in a context of profound social and economic uncert...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter discusses the labour dynamics that have been emerging within a rapidly growing textil... more The chapter discusses the labour dynamics that have been emerging within a rapidly growing textile global value chain in Tigray’s capital city Mekelle since the mid-2010s. In the context of an ambitious industrialization policy urged to sustain export-led economic growth, reduce dependency on agriculture and services, and to address pressing political problems such as rising urban unemployment, the Ethiopian government managed to attract global production networks around newly established industrial poles, primarily geared towards manufacturing. Due to a number of historical, political, and geographical factors, by the mid-2010s Tigray was at the forefront of this development. The rapid consolidation of the textile industry in the area around Mekelle generated a new labour question: the coexistence of labour shortage around the textile industrial hub and a large population seeking employment. Empirically the chapter discusses the stories of young workers and trainees navigating text...
Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to... more Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to our conceptualization of state formation in Africa at a time in which the continent witnesses profound social and political transformations inscribed in increasingly globalized and localized dynamics. The book revisits key theories of the state, adopting a detailed empirical approach that studies how state power operates in the everyday. It locates the mutual constitution of state and society in the wide set of scalar processes that articulate how state power structures social life and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for new openings and social formations. Drawing on five qualitative fieldworks in Ethiopia between 2006 and 2018, the book identifies some important challenges that the ruling Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has encountered in institutionalizing power through the developmental state, an ambitious model of state-mediated econo...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter situates the problematic of this book alongside ongoing discussions in African studie... more The chapter situates the problematic of this book alongside ongoing discussions in African studies around methodological nationalism—the tendency of theory to restrict the analytical scope of social and political change against the lens of the nation-state—and descriptive empiricism—the tendency of theory to provide cultural explanations of state power by reifying micro empirical realities. It contends that the lens of the everyday allows for an empirical approach to map the mutual, and yet largely undetermined, constitution of state and society over time, departing from depictions of state formation in Africa that rely on meta-historical narrations, as well as the reification of micro analyses that have little scope for generalization. The chapter interrogates the everyday state by engaging with questions about the temporality of state formation, the spatial configurations of state-society relations, and the problem of subject formation in relation to state power. In particular, it...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter discusses the case of a resettlement programme in Waag Himra (Amhara region) that th... more This chapter discusses the case of a resettlement programme in Waag Himra (Amhara region) that the Ethiopian government implemented in the course of the 2000s. Intended to relocate rural households to less densely populated areas for humanitarian purposes, the programme entailed an increased deployment of the state apparatus in rural areas under a new political impulse on productivism. While the programme generated considerable initial expectations—despite the controversial legacy of resettlement during the Derg—most beneficiaries returned home within months after facing conflict, drought, and a lack of basic infrastructure. The chapter describes the ways in which returnees tried to make the most of limited opportunities, diversify risk, and reconstitute themselves as social, economic, and political subjects. Resettlers tried to navigate the limited opportunities offered by the programme facing significant strains both in the relocation sites and then when they returned home. The ch...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
The chapter discusses the promotion of entrepreneurship schemes in Kolfe Keranyo, one peri-urban ... more The chapter discusses the promotion of entrepreneurship schemes in Kolfe Keranyo, one peri-urban sub-city of Addis Ababa. Against a context in which, towards the end of the 2000s, addressing unemployment in rapidly expanding urban centres became an urgent political and economic priority, the Ethiopian government implemented a comprehensive policy of job creation relying on the promotion micro and small enterprises. Empirically the chapter discusses the practices through which young entrepreneurs manoeuvred the few opportunities mobilized by these schemes, such as access to credit, to perform other side and informal businesses that allowed them to make up for their social and economic reproduction which state-mandated enterprises were not able to deliver. The political subject is mobilized here through a subtle and quite sophisticated performance of power. Entrepreneurs diverted time and resources from state-mandated enterprises because the formal businesses they were asked to enrol ...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This concluding chapter summarizes and articulates the findings of the book’s five empirical chap... more This concluding chapter summarizes and articulates the findings of the book’s five empirical chapters along two main themes. The first is that the everyday offers a privileged perspective to study the complex scalar dynamics within which trajectories of state formation in contemporary Africa are enmeshed. This allows us to circumvent the problem of methodological nationalism by attending those histories that challenge meta-narration of state formation. The problem of scale thus requires putting under critical scrutiny how scholarship constructs scale as a research object, emphasizing the power field that specific categorization, such as ‘global’, ‘national’, and ‘local’, necessarily mobilize. The second theme is that a focus on the problem of subjection offers the opportunity to study how state power forms the political subject through practices of recognition and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for a radically conditioned identity without resorting to cultura...
Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia
This chapter discusses the implementation of a national programme of rural land registration in S... more This chapter discusses the implementation of a national programme of rural land registration in Siraro, Oromia region, that was introduced in the mid 2000s. Motivated by concerns over increasing the productivity of smallholder agriculture, the capitalization of land, and the uncapping of land rental markets, the programme was implemented as part of an ambitious set of policy reforms providing for the decentralization of service delivery and resource management from central to local government. Empirically the chapter discusses the set of practices and tactics of manoeuvring land registration, which local government officials and farmers performed to tackle insecurity, conflict, uncertainty, and the ensuing threat of dispossession that came with the programme. The chapter discusses the ways in which Oromo farmers, against a long and controversial history of exploitative land relations, reconstituted material and symbolic values to the land after land registration threatened their soc...
We explore the notion of “sacrifice zones” to reflect critically on the trade-offs between Scienc... more We explore the notion of “sacrifice zones” to reflect critically on the trade-offs between Science & Technology (S&T) policy and inclusive development in South Africa. We draw evidence from one of the country’s flagship projects, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, currently under construction in the semi-arid Northern Cape. The SKA embodies a key tension in the country’s S&T policy, that between the promotion of astronomy, based on national and global priorities (the development of science), and the advancement of local development concerns (science for development), in which the dominant assumption is that local interests are either subsumed or superseded by national and global public goods. Given the extent to which the priorities of local residents have been overlooked in the name of the greater good, we argue that a fruitful way of recasting this relationship is to regard the region around the telescope as astronomy’s terrestrial “sacrifice zone”; this opens up an...
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 2018
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2019
Historians and social scientists of southern Africa have been slow to engage with what is undoubt... more Historians and social scientists of southern Africa have been slow to engage with what is undoubtedly the region's most ambitious investment in 'big science' in the new millennium: the radio astronomy project of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the core site of which is located in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa (see Figure 1). Yet this mega-project, the immediate origins of which date back to the intersecting millennial moments of intense globalisation and democratic transition in South Africa, should be of considerable interest for scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Intended to probe fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, 1 the SKA raises significant conceptual, theoretical, methodological and ethical challenges for those concerned with social and environmental dynamics on Earth, across different scales and registers of analysis. Issues include understanding the project's national and regional geo-political implications, its local social and environmental impacts and the contestations they are engendering, as well as its global importance on the frontiers of scientific knowledge; the project also raises profound questions about human agency and modes of knowing, meaning-making and representation. That the core site of this endeavour is located in the Karoo, at once the historic heartland of the devastating encounter between white settlers and indigenous Khoisan groups in the colonial period and today one of the country's most marginal regions, adds a sharp political edge to critical engagements with the unfolding of this project in South Africa. Within the African continent more broadly, the SKA is tightly tied to South Africa's conception of itself as a modernising, developmental state and leading continental power. It is also core to wider ambitions to reshape Africa's relationship to global science. Once completed, the full Array is projected to reach into a further eight African countries, most but not all located in southern Africa:
Journal of Southern African Studies, 2019
The establishment of an astronomy reserve around the core site of the Square Kilometre Array radi... more The establishment of an astronomy reserve around the core site of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope marks the beginning of an epochal shift away from commercial sheep farming in the upper Karoo. In this article, I reflect on the significance of this 'astronomy revolution' by exploring the ways in which land is central to dynamics of identification, shaping social hierarchies and development expectations. The article uses archival and ethnographic sources to explore the case of Carnarvon. It contextualises the current land-use change to astronomy in the social history of the town, addressing the set of events that marked an earlier epochal change: the transition from communal to commercial sheep farming, often called the 'merino revolution'. The history of land alienation accompanying this earlier transition resurfaces in current claims lodged through the post-apartheid land restitution programme, which intersect in complex ways with the current land-use change to astronomy. The article identifies a central tension in the 'astronomy revolution', which undermines claims to redress local historical inequalities while promoting identification with a broader national and global development priority.
Africa, 2019
By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this a... more By discussing details of the current policy emphasis on entrepreneurship and microfinance, this article explores the dynamic and inconclusive negotiation of state authority in Kolfe Keraniyo, peri-urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In the last few years, Ethiopia embarked on a strategy of rapid transformation driven by what its political elite defined as a ‘developmental state’, which entailed the significant rescaling of the peri-urban space. The promotion of micro and small enterprises is an important aspect of the territorialization of state power in the peri-urban space, and is actively negotiated, challenged and refashioned. The first part of the article presents three central aspects of such projects: the policy of regularization and legalization; the notion of ‘group first’ or collective participation in the country's development; and the emphasis on ‘saving first’ to create micro-dynamics of capital accumulation. The second part of the article discusses how the beneficiaries o...
Third World Quarterly, 2018
The article poses questions about astronomy and its local, national and global developmental impa... more The article poses questions about astronomy and its local, national and global developmental impacts, drawing on ongoing research around the internationally networked Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope in South Africa. The relationship between progress in global science and technology and societal change has traditionally been framed through western-centric notions of progress imbued with universalism; the field of astronomy exemplifies this approach, with its assumptions of an inherently positive correlation between its science and loosely defined notions of 'development'. We problematise this assumption through an analysis of the multiple notions of development at different scales of analysis in the SKA. We argue that large astronomy projects such as the SKA are best understood as dense assemblages of science, infrastructure, human agency and politics, in which historically rooted local concerns are marginalised in the name of the national or global public interest.
Contested Extractivism, Society and the State, 2017
This chapter explores the complexities of contemporary market-driven land reform in Malawi throug... more This chapter explores the complexities of contemporary market-driven land reform in Malawi through the case of the Community Based Rural Land Development Project. By discussing the stories of beneficiaries returning home shortly after the project’s inception, this chapter critically analyses the politics of resettlement underpinning land reform. I argue that the ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ model, while driven by the strong ethos of formalizing the rural economy, at the same time creates inequalities in resource access and social exclusion. The chapter concludes that market-driven land redistribution projects involve a broader restructuring of political power and authority, without extinguishing the functions of existing institutions governing land.