Redundancy, Resilience, Repair: Infrastructural Effects in Borderland Spaces (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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.
The 2015 earthquakes in Nepal killed more than 9,000 people, displaced millions of people and deeply affected the economy. The earthquakes and reconstructions processes also transformed Nepal into a complex terrain of geoeconomic accumulation and geopolitical manoeuvring, including major international capital flows, the promulgation of a new constitution, an economic blockade by India and the expansion of trade corridors with China. Building on critiques of 'disaster capitalism', we propose and mobilize the concept of 'geo-logics of power' to draw further attention to the materialities of geopolitical and geoeconomic processes shaping reconstruction in post-earthquake Nepal. Focusing on two trans-Himalayan corridors connecting Nepal and China, we argue that the Nepal experienced a particular form of disaster capitalism: one in which the geo-logics of powerincluding trans-Himalayan discourses, practices, and materialitiescame to shape political and economic transformations of a country long portrayed as a 'buffer' state between Indian and China. More broadly, we suggest that geo-logics of power result from a combination of geopolitical and geoeconomic power dynamics informed by geological formations and associated socio-natural processes.
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.
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.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017
This article looks at a trans-Himalayan borderland to see how new road development projects affect social and sovereign relationships across mountain landscapes between Chinese Tibet and Mustang, Nepal. Research asked about local experiences with new forms of motorized transport and popular consumption of Chinese-manufactured commodities to understand what factors led the Nepali state to undertake new bureaucratic projects in a historically peripheral space. Employing a dialectic framework of mobility and containment, a materialist-territorial analysis reveals how transborder infrastructure development affects trade relations and consumption practices in the Nepal–China borderlands and, in turn, how these dynamics condition state-making processes at social and geopolitical levels. Following the cross-scalar trajectory of one rural road project from local grassroots initiative to national development program to international transportation network, I argue that the economic interests of a place-based project with regional cultural connections set in motion an expanding presence of Nepali state apparatuses in a trans-Himalayan borderland space.
This photo essay illustrates and contrasts the infrastructure and operations of three international border posts between China and Nepal. Located at Zhangmu-Kodari, Kyirong-Rasuwa, and Likse-Neychung borders, these posts function as the only motorable China-Nepal border crossings and represent half of the six official, open borders recognized by Kathmandu and Beijing. In addition to China's new position as Nepal's number-one source of foreign direct investment, bilateral trade, humanitarian aid, and tourism traffic between the two countries continue to expand annually. As infrastructure development facilitates new political-economic dynamics between China and Nepal, these three border posts are becoming increasingly potent symbols of ongoing evolutions in Sino-Nepal relations. Because each crossing is also located at Nepal's border with the Tibet Autonomous Region, each site exhibits a complex politics of identity, citizenship, and mobility with respect to the movement and control of local traders, Tibetan exiles, the Nepali Army, and the Chinese State Police, among other actors.
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.