A Himalayan Border Trilogy: The Political Economies of Transport Infrastructure and Disaster Relief between China and Nepal (original) (raw)
Related papers
South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, 2017
Infrastructure developments across the trans-Himalaya have rapidly advanced Nepali and Chinese state presences across spaces where central governance has long been absent. This study examines how new border infrastructures of fences and roads shape commercial and cultural relationships between Mustang (Nepal) and Tibet and the ways in which these processes serve state-making purposes for both Nepal and China through the governance of highland–borderland landscapes. A Tibetan cultural region at Nepal's northern border, Mustang's human and physical geography supports trade corridors that link the Tibetan Plateau with the plains of India. Merchants, mendicants and militaries have traversed these trade routes for centuries, giving rise to a unique social landscape that largely transcends modern demarcations of a bordered world. Looking across the trans-Himalaya, this article argues that as Chinese and Nepali authorities introduce new material structures and institutional practices to regulate and solidify the border between Tibet and Mustang, local communities are alternatively oriented towards either Kathmandu or Beijing under shifting terms of economic and political power.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2017
Infrastructure developments across the trans-Himalaya have rapidly advanced Nepali and Chinese state presences across spaces where central governance has long been absent. This study examines how new border infrastructures of fences and roads shape commercial and cultural relationships between Mustang (Nepal) and Tibet and the ways in which these processes serve state-making purposes for both Nepal and China through the governance of highlandborderland landscapes. A Tibetan cultural region at Nepal's northern border, Mustang's human and physical geography supports trade corridors that link the Tibetan Plateau with the plains of India. Merchants, mendicants and militaries have traversed these trade routes for centuries, giving rise to a unique social landscape that largely transcends modern demarcations of a bordered world. Looking across the trans-Himalaya, this article argues that as Chinese and Nepali authorities introduce new material structures and institutional practices to regulate and solidify the border between Tibet and Mustang, local communities are alternatively oriented towards either Kathmandu or Beijing under shifting terms of economic and political power.
BORDER CORRIDORS: Mobility, Containment, and Infrastructures of Development between Nepal and China
PhD Dissertation, Department of Geography, University of Colorado Boulder, 2017
This dissertation examines infrastructure development between Nepal and China to argue that infrastructure is a symbol of national development imaginaries, a process and practice of state making, and a vector for the spatial operations of geopolitical power. Starting with the construction of a small trans-border road in Nepal’s northern district of Mustang, I examine how a local infrastructure project has evolved into and been incorporated within larger, international transportation networks, border regimes, trade and tax policies, and humanitarian programs. In making this analysis, I introduce the concept of border corridors to examine how highways, fences, bureaucracies, and aid are interwoven infrastructural components that build upon one another in scalar and fractal ways in the production of larger infrastructure systems. Utilizing the dialectical lenses of mobility and containment to see how infrastructure development in Mustang constitutes new forms of border corridors, I argue that shifting configurations of trade networks and sovereign rule have (re)shaped social relations across the region that are in turn expressed through unique but oscillating geographical imaginaries. As fractal constructions and relational processes that augment, redirect, and replace one another, I also show that infrastructures are not things with definitive edges, beginnings, or endings but, rather, interdependent pieces of broader and more complex material configurations. In order to see the state by looking at the borderlands, I also examine infrastructures as material processes that undergird state formation and illustrate how cultural practices and geopolitical interests converge in material and territorial ways through the production of roads, borders, commodity circulations, and humanitarian aid. Unraveling the entanglements of these infrastructural systems, I show how infrastructures intersect and refract one another across trans-Himalayan spaces and, in so doing, reconfigure relationships between states and citizens. Particularly in the context of greater Chinese interventions in South Asia and possible future trajectories of Beijing’s One Belt One Road Initiative, I argue that infrastructure development in Nepal presents a valuable case with which to understand the linkages between broad international processes of South-South development and local community level experiences with changing subject positions and social stratification.
Roads to China and infrastructural relations in Nepal
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2020
Across the Himalaya region, infrastructure development constitutes an array of material practices that produce space for both Nepali and Chinese state making efforts in historically roadless places. In northern Nepal, the production of large-scale transportation infrastructure has reached unprecedented levels, and Chinese interventions under the Belt and Road Initiative continue to fuel Kathmandu's development imaginary. Examining the anticipation, articulation and implementation of road networks between northern Nepal and Chinese Tibet, I analyse the incorporation of a small development project into larger international transportation systems to argue that infrastructure is a symbolic project of national development imaginaries, a process and practice of state making, and a vector for the spatial operations of geopolitical power. Putting infrastructure studies into closer conversation with political geography, I propose infrastructural relationality as a heuristic that illuminates how trans-national road construction advances regional development objectives, visible specifically through interrelated projects, practices and processes between China and Nepal.
Facing the fence: The production and performance of a Himalayan border in global contexts
Political Geography, 2019
This paper analyzes the spatial operations of power in a Himalayan borderland between Nepal and China to argue that border regimes are made, maintained, and performed as territorial processes of control over distinct socio-cultural identities and political economic practices. I make this argument by writing a boundary biography (Megoran, 2006, 2012) about a fence, bringing both history and ethnography to bear on border studies. Specifically, this biography analyzes the Nepal-China border at Mustang-Tibet in two distinct dimensions: 1) the physical (or external) location of the border as a marker of state territory between Nepal and China; and 2) the social and cultural (or internal) location of the border for borderland populations of Tibetan ethnicity. In correspondence to Salter's (2011) formal, practical, and popular registers of bordering, I use ethnography, readings of diplomatic history, and policy analysis to examine social-political transformations at the Nepal-China border through three specific changes over time. These key moments reflect important state interventions which together shape how the Mustang-Tibet border is experienced in Himalayan borderland lives today. In so doing, this biography shows how borders materialize, dematerialize, and rematerialize and how local populations' identities and geographic imaginaries are influenced and oriented by the border (Sahlins, 1989). By demonstrating how border lives are often shaped and maintained with and across the border rather than against the border itself, this study presents emerging research on Asian borderlands to rethink classic concepts on bordering developed in European and wider global contexts.
Sino-Nepali road developments are transforming the trans-Himalayan borderlands. Historically across Nepal's northern districts, state presence has long been characterized by its absence. However, as contemporary road projects establish new social and physical links with both central Nepal and Chinese Tibet, new arrangements of both mobility and containment reposition local community members as consumers and citizens of an outwardly territorializing Nepali state. Road infrastructure is a fundamental vector of this change and the development of new transportation systems raise new questions about the social and political implications of international infrastructure development in 21 st century Asia. Particularly in Nepal's northern districts such as Mustang, Rasuwa, and Sindupalchowk, road projects and associated infrastructure programs are experienced both materially and discursively as development – or bikas in Nepali – and shape social encounters with modernity and globalization in the Nepal-China borderlands. But for whom are these developments being made, and by whom, and to what ends? This paper makes a cross-scalar examination of three road systems in Nepal to argue that infrastructure development provides a productive point of intersection for social development imaginaries, national state making priorities, and the spatial operations of geopolitical power. However, rather than an analysis of infrastructure itself, this study looks to infrastructure construction both socially and materially: as a driver of social reconfiguration and geographical reorientation as well as catalyst of capital accumulation, disaster recovery, and ongoing state formation.
Roadology: roads, space and culture, 2016
In recent years, infrastructure development has proliferated between China and South Asia. Particularly across the Trans-Himalaya interface of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and highland Nepal, historical trade routes are being reconstructed into modern roads. As border crossings reopen throughout the region, overland connections are significantly transforming political-economic systems and socio-cultural relations for highland populations on both sides of the Tibet-Nepal border. This study uses Trans-Himalayan roads as a lens of analysis to examine the ways in which cross-border social, economic, and cultural relations are imagined, shaped, and renewed as a result of infrastructure development between China and Nepal. In this paper, I approach recent Trans-Himalayan road development projects through Science and Technology Studies’ theories on co-production (Jasanoff, 2004, 2013) and Marxist conceptualizations of the social production of spatial fixes (Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1992). Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted along emerging road networks on both sides of the Tibet-Nepal border, this study further explores the ways in which roads, borders, mobility, and consumption are negotiated, disrupted, and co-produced for communities between southern Tibet of China and highland Nepal.
This report reviews four weeks of research on the politics of post-earthquake reconstruction, humanitarianism, and state building in Nepal. Although field research specifically examined the role and impacts of Chinese relief aid to Nepal, this report reviews and exposes the broader political constraints and reconstruction paralysis that currently threatens social and economic wellbeing across the country. While this project is an integral part of my larger dissertation and humanitarian work in Nepal, the scope of this report is limited to field research conducted from December 27, 2015 – January 18, 2016 and the general climate of post-earthquake reconstruction and recovery efforts. Funding for this project was a Quick Response Grant ($3000) from the Natural Hazards Center of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Political Geography, 2020
This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated development and negotiations concerning Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing from ethnographic research focused on sites of ongoing and planned infrastructure development in Nepal’s two northern districts of Rasuwa and Gorkha, we analyze the uncertain remaking of these areas into trans-Himalayan power corridors. Our examination reveals the gamut of transitions, opportunities, reorientations, and expectations that the BRI and other forms of Chinese investment evoke in Nepal, showing how politics articulate infrastructures, and vice versa. After reviewing the historical context of Nepal-China relations, our empirical analysis begins in late 2014 when China became the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Nepal, continues through several rounds of negotiations about the BRI and other forms of Chinese infrastructural investment and aid, and concludes with a review of significant Nepal-China agreements at the Second Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing in April 2019. Tacking between remote construction sites, scenes of diplomatic debate, borderland villages, investment summits, and speculative media coverage, we demonstrate how the Belt and Road Initiative is differently enacted and co-constructed by a variety of Nepali and Chinese actors who interpret, reimagine, and rhetorically appropriate the BRI within their own narrations of future possibility.