Boundary commissions as tools to safeguard British interests at the end of empire

Borders and mobility in South Asia and beyond

“…Scholars such as Joya Chatterji, Lucy Chester, Vazira Zamindar, Willem van Schendel, and Jason Cons have each made significant contributions to the research on the aftermath of Partition's borders in South Asia (Chatterji 1994Chester 2008Chester , 2013. Collectively, their work considers the arbitrary nature of the borders that have divided South Asia for seventy years and investigates the role these lines continue to play in the politics, economics, and cultural production of South Asia.…”

“…Other scholars have considered the boundary commissions' decisionmaking process and the impact of the lines they drew. Chester's work analyses the role of the boundary commissions in the Partition decision and the consequences for the India-Pakistan border (Chester 2008(Chester , 2013. Chester argues that the Partition boundaries demonstrate the effort of British colonial leaders to maintain some semblance of control over South Asia even after decolonization.…”

“…However, the legacy of arbitrary borders left behind by colonists and the subsequent decades of conflict between the various states over the territorial extent of their sovereignty creates an ideal location for interrogations of state categories of power, place, and identity (Chester 2008(Chester , 2013Jones 2009;Samaddar 1999;Shewly 2013;Sur 2013;Whyte, 2002;. While some of the borders in South Asia are among the most violent in the world, others are still wide open and feature crossborder flows and connections.…”

Imagining a Critical Geopolitical Cartography

“…A conventional geopolitical cartography of Kashmir is a collage of disjointed lines and clumsy polygons, placing heavy emphasis on separation in representing the occupied, claimed, ceded, and disputed spaces. Political historians argue that Kashmir should not be framed as mismatched Cartesian demarcations and territorial disputes (Chester ) but by how lasting imperial legacies construct the post‐partition material conditions of violence, exceptional security, and fence‐building. A Central Intelligence Agency map of Kashmir (Figure )—to use an example of conventional, state‐centric cartography—reinforces imperial legacies by carving the contentions and politically fluid former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir into discrete areas of occupation and containment.…”

Historical geography 2007—2008: Foucault's avatars — still in (the) Driver's seat

“…As Gregory and Healey point out, furthermore, it is only for the era when such data sets were produced that those practising historical GIS can set to work (Gregory and Healey, 2007). Even more attention has been paid to the geopolitical, ideological and physical construction of boundaries through the operation of boundary commissions, this work focusing on the era from c.1850 to 1950 and attending to Albania (Guy, 2008), the Congo-Rhodesia (Donaldson, 2008), South Asia and Palestine (Chester, 2008), Ireland (Rankin, 2008) and Iraq (Schofi eld, 2008). As this list reminds us, attempts to create legible state spaces pliant to management have over the longue durée created the turbulences that human geographers of a less historical bent attend to.…”