The Spatial Politics of <scp>Infrastructure‐Led</scp> Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

Akhter, Majed; Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad; Karrar, Hasan H.

doi:10.1111/anti.12832

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…More generally, long-term reduction in watercourse channel capacity in these hydraulic systems due to sedimentation was also considered a key reason exacerbating those floods (Mustafa and Wrathall 2011). Beyond engineering problems or failures, there is also wider conversation taking place on whether Pakistan's ideological bias towards modernist engineering solutions (Akhter et al 2022) needs to be re-considered in favour of a more decolonial approach (Mustafa 2022).…”

Section: Water Management Along the Indus Deltamentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan

Otto

Zachariah

Saeed

et al. 2023

Environ. Res.: Climate

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As a direct consequence of extreme monsoon rainfall throughout the summer 2022 season Pakistan experienced the worst flooding in its history. We employ a probabilistic event attribution methodology as well as a detailed assessment of the dynamics to understand the role of climate change in this event. Many of the available state-of-the-art climate models struggle to simulate these rainfall characteristics. Those that pass our evaluation test generally show a much smaller change in likelihood and intensity of extreme rainfall than the trend we found in the observations. This discrepancy suggests that long-term variability, or processes that our evaluation may not capture, can play an important role, rendering it infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change. However, the majority of models and observations we have analysed show that intense rainfall has become heavier as Pakistan has warmed. Some of these models suggest climate change could have increased the rainfall intensity up to 50%. The devastating impacts were also driven by the proximity of human settlements, infrastructure (homes, buildings, bridges), and agricultural land to flood plains, inadequate infrastructure, limited ex-ante risk reduction capacity, an outdated river management system, underlying vulnerabilities driven by high poverty rates and socioeconomic factors (e.g. gender, age, income, and education), and ongoing political and economic instability. Both current conditions and the potential further increase in extreme peaks in rainfall over Pakistan in light of anthropogenic climate change, highlight the urgent need to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather in Pakistan.

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Section: Water Management Along the Indus Deltamentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan

Otto

Zachariah

Saeed

et al. 2023

Environ. Res.: Climate

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“…For instance, colonial hydraulic infrastructure projects on the Indus River enabled resource extraction and expanded territorial rule, while connecting the colonial past to the present nation state in both Pakistan and India (Haines, 2014(Haines, , 2017. While rooted in colonial periods and logics, these types of projects transcend colonial and post-colonial periods and continue to be engines of modernity, as well as conflict (Akhter et al, 2022).…”

Section: Big Water Infrastructure As a Temporal Process Embedded In C...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

Birkenholtz

2023

Geography Compass

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Largescale “big” water infrastructure is once again at the forefront of the global developmentalist agenda and is receiving attendant scholarly attention. Given this parallel growth, now is time to take stock of current scholarly contributions and explore opportunities for future research. In this paper, I review recent developments and insights gained from research on big water infrastructure, and water infrastructure studies, generally, to highlight six key threads of current scholarship. These include the production of big water infrastructure as: (1) a temporal process embedded in colonialism and ecological modernization; (2) infused with infrastructural knowledges, practices and subjectivities; (3) a spatial‐geopolitical process; (4) subject to infrastructural and environmental material characteristics and capacities; (5) producing uneven development and enabling accumulation by dispossession; and (6) a contested process of differentiated socio‐material resistance. In reviewing this literature, I argue that these six research strands form key analytic considerations that could be employed by others studying the nexus between water development, political ecological change, and infrastructure. Before concluding, in the final section of the paper I present additional and ongoing future research directions including big water infrastructure as it intersects with socially differentiated human intimacy and embodiment, indigenous and racialized forms of dispossession, and financialization.

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“…Digital infrastructures provide states flexible techniques to undermine, threaten and sabotage resistance movements (Docot, 2021;Shires, 2021). Such authoritarian trends have likely been amplified in the wake of COVID-19 (Aidi, 2021;Shaheed & Greenacre, 2021), in tandem with an intensification of infrastructure-led, developmentalist ideology in postcolonial societies (Akhter et al, 2022). Authoritarian governance increasingly materializes through 'infrastructural modalities of power' (von Schnitzler, 2016, p. 12).…”

Section: Situating Digital Infrastructural Harm Within Authoritariani...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People speculated that these power outages also reflected the prioritization of public agribusiness contracts and the exporting of electricity to neighbouring countries for state profit (conversation with activists, Jimma, 2016). While immense infrastructural projects like hydroelectric dams are often touted as progress/modernization in ways used to legitimize and reinforce the power of the state (Mbembe & Roitman, 1995;Akhter et al, 2022), they frequently produce significant harms (Davies, 2021) including through displacement, ecocide, impoverishment, exacerbation of national indebtedness, inflation (Mains, 2012), and more. The routine proportion of electrical brown-and blackouts is similarly elevated in Cameroon (Chingwete et al, 2019).…”

Section: Digital Infrastructural Harm Within the Coloniality Of Infra...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia

Murrey

2022

Globalizations

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In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive stateinitiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to argue that the state suspension of internet connectivity is a form of infrastructural harm; an intentional violence made socially and structurally possible by the colonial configurations of infrastructure. My analysis draws from five years of digital ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, including 13 months in Jimma, Ethiopia and nine months in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I mobilize a decolonial praxis that unmasks practices of authoritarian control within global racial coloniality, and seeks to foster cross-fertilizations of struggle and resistance praxis.

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The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

Cited by 10 publications

References 77 publications

Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan

Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia

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