This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an 'inevitable' consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.

While nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are recognized for the important role they play in development planning, particularly as sites for democratic change, little attention is given to how they prefigure the economic and social reorganization of everyday life and provide a venue for privatization and the liberalization of previously nationalized economies. This article examines the transformation of NGOs in Bangladesh since independence against the backdrop of struggles between NGOs and the conservative religious party, Jama'at-I-Islami. Highlighting the competing interests of the donor community and a heterogeneous cadre of development workers, the contradictory interests and outcomes of NGO activities are identified in the context of the neoliberal agenda of contemporary development assistance. As women mark the politics of both the Jama'at-I-Islami and the NGOs, they provide a crucial empirical referent for observing the transformation of civil society, or the space “between the state and its citizens,” in contemporary Bangladesh.

This article identifies the epistemological and ethical problems that accompany the growing mandate to archive and share qualitative data. We call attention to the potential consequences of “shared access” for data that is premised on meaning-making and interpretation embedded in interactions between the researcher and those they study. We argue that context specificity and the co-constitutive processes of qualitative data production preclude the separation of “evidence” from the relations of its production that is required when evidence is archived for future use by others. Furthermore, we identify the ethical challenges that attend to ensuring the rights and confidentiality of those we engage and the particular concerns such engagement entails for vulnerable populations when securing informed consent for the use of data by future unknown researchers. Finally, we ask whether the claim for greater efficiencies and accountability of public access are appropriate for the co-constitutive character of qualitative evidence and what these demands portend for knowledge production. We conclude by calling for the development of protocols to guide researchers who are sensitive to these issues but must respond to calls to archive and share their data.

No abstract

It is perhaps commonplace to argue that displacement issues are crucial for understanding processes of global (re)integration and economic change in the twenty-first century. We know, for example, that processes of displacement characterise the restructuring of states and economic sectors, innovative forms of employment and economic subsistence, and the building of modern infrastructure or megaprojects not limited to dams and roadways. We also know that discourses about development increasingly reflect an interest in displacement in conceptualisations of modernity and territorialisation, and in understanding modes of economic, political, and social formations and interventions. Not surprisingly, whether exploring post-colonial states, the globalisation of industrial and military complexes, planned resettlement schemes and infrastructural projects, or the consequences of war and the creation of refugees, we can see communities and solidarities cast asunder in ways that prompt new meanings of belonging, home, identity, citizenship, and rights. These changes make displacement a crucial aspect of contemporary experience.With some notable exceptions, only recently have the social sciences 1 explored questions of place and displacement. In prior thinking, connections to place and movements from it, interactions across place and complex negotiations in place, were often, although not always, assumed. This meant that the concept of place was deployed more as a descriptive than an analytic notion, and generally given only limited theoretical review. It also meant that questions associated with processes of negotiation, and with the capacities of people to make choices about displacement, have often been left unexplored. This is exemplified by demographers who generally emphasise the patterning of population shifts across time and place rather than focus on place or space as both context and analytic.Yet, social science is awakening not only to place, settlement, and movement, but to imposed place, forced resettlement, and involuntary migration. Thomas Gieryn's paper ''A Space for Place in Sociology'' (2000) ranks number four in the accounting of the most read articles in sociology, and Goodchild et al. (2000) correctly identify the analysis of space and place as an increasingly pivotal component of social science research. Demographers also have begun to question the complexities associated with how established and emergent communities sustain networks with their places of origin, as well as construct networks in their new places of residence. Geographers and urban scholars, inspired by feminist analyses, have drawn attention to new configurations of urban communities and the use and meanings of space and place. Cultural anthropologists have identified new theoretical terrain to unsettle the static meaning of location and rethink relationships between people and nation, state, identity, and transnationality. Tying displacement to transnationality also has become a lens for interpreting people's experience as an enactment ...