Violence on the Margins

States, Conflict, and Borderlands

Timothy Raeymaekers, B. Korf

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137333995
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This survey of various African and Asian conflicts examines people's experiences on territorial borders and the ways they affect political configurations. By focusing on individuals' routines and daily life, these contributions treat borderland dynamics as actual political units with their own actions and outcomes.

PART I

Introducing a Borderland Perspective

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Border, Frontier and the Geography of Rule at the Margins of the State

Benedikt Korf and Timothy Raeymaekers

Imagine standing somewhere on the Khyber Pass: a rough mountain route harboring the bustling borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). In Karkhana bazaar, which straddles the borderline between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Khyber Agency, tourists and UN agents haggle for cheap alcohol and cannabis resin in the market stalls. Bicycle transporters are carrying boxes of smuggled car parts and electric appliances into Peshawar, meeting their counterparts who are carrying drugs and weapons into the Pakistani FATA. Once in a while a U.S. helicopter hovers overhead, determined to seek and destroy fighting Taliban units, which are constantly crossing the border.¹ Imagine now standing on the border in Goma, the Congolese twin town of Rwandan Gisenyi. On the Petite Barriere (“small checkpoint”), a long line of pedestrians crosses this merged city center, like ants on a sugar hill. Women carrying bags of foodstuffs are joined by smugglers transporting minerals from the Congolese mines of North and South Kivu. Their Rwandan counterparts bring petroleum and cement into Congo, along with construction materials and consumer goods from Mombasa and the Far East. Differences in the taxation laws of the two countries lead to widespread smuggling. Some goods are even unofficially reexported into Rwanda to avoid consumer taxes. The military on both sides watches these operations with a lazy eye, taking bribes and occasionally stopping traffic.²

Two borders, two similar dynamics. What unites daily border practices in both places are a number of formal and informal checkpoints, which tentatively divide these expanding borderlands and the actions that define them. For many people in Goma and Peshawar, the border has become a resource rather than an obstacle, providing livelihoods and political status and serving as a sanctuary against mutual incursions. These positive experiences have been reciprocally influenced by decades of outright and proxy warfare, allegations of support for militias and rebel groups and hesitant efforts to reach a political rapprochement. The different meanings these borders historically acquired thus appear related to their different configurations across space, which—as Paolo Novak writes—are determined to a large extent by institutional contingencies, social connectivity and the qualities of territory attached to the borders.³ This volume makes a first attempt to compare a number of Asian and African conflict formations on the basis of people’s own experiences on territorial borders and the way these experiences affect the making and unmaking of political configurations. By focusing on such routines and daily performances, the contributors to this volume depict borderland dynamics not just as outcomes of diffusing statehood or globalization, but also as actual political units that generate their own actions and outcomes. Particular attention is paid to the explicit trans-boundary character of conflict and peace, which is presented from political, geographical, historical and ethnographic perspectives. An alternative is sought to the still dominant idea of contemporary state formation as a centrally guided, top-down process, which has led to a deep misunderstanding of borderlands as marginal spaces that are either fraught with avoidance, savagery and rebellion—or lingering in dark oblivion.

Where Does the State End?

This question, asked by the anthropologist and philosopher Talal Asad, is meant to remind us that the state is never a fixed object. Its boundaries change, as does its internal morphology: the different ways of determining exclusion and inclusion, inside and outside, law and exception.⁴ In their volume on the margins of the state, Veena Das and Deborah Poole go a long way in deconstructing the fetishism of this fixed unity of the modern nation-state by identifying the different peripheries in which the state has yet to penetrate. They describe margins as sites where law-making and other state performances are not just evaded, but actively transformed and “colonized” by other more or less organized practices, thus generating important political and economic outcomes that may have a decisive impact on state formation in a broader sense (see also Chapter 8). Rather than focusing on the geography of this encounter, they prefer to metaphorically deconstruct the ways in which this myth of the state as the invisible ghostwriter of our lives is reproduced through a continuous unsettling of rights, which makes political life both unintelligible and unpredictable. Through embedding itself in such unsettling movements, for example, in the domain of citizenship rights or policing, crisis becomes a powerful technology of state government, which means that margins often become central to the daily reality of state rule.⁵

In this volume, we concentrate directly on the site of state marginality: on the particular spaces in which state practices and images are copresent with other systems of rule, and the dynamics this produces between the people, objects and ideas circulating in such spaces. These are questions of geography: of borders, borderlands and boundaries, but also of periphery, center and frontier. Indeed, the unsettling and often violent renegotiation of rights and social conditions that characterizes the margins of state rule has to be imagined in specific sites: be they the human body, a police barrack, or a town on the border. Asking exactly where the state ends geographically makes it possible to ask, for example, what happens in places, sites and locations where state forms of organization are slowly penetrating other systems of socio-spatial regulation, are competing with other sovereignties, or are even withdrawing from their sovereign right to rule. It also permits us to visualize the often fragmented geographies of sovereignty that characterize state–society encounters at the physical margins of the state, and which often involve important processes of bordering and boundary-drawing between what is categorically termed as distinctions between state and society, formal and informal or public and private systems of rule.⁶

The Border(land) Perspective

The more intriguing question to ask is probably: what happens where the state ends. This brings us to the borderland perspective, which is central to this book. Since the mid-1990s, the borderland perspective has challenged the received wisdom about contemporary state formation as a centrally guided, top-down process.⁷ Far from being residual spaces, borders are key sites of contestation and negotiation, which, in many ways, are central to state-making processes. Border zones are not just reflective of power relations at the “center”, but they are also constitutive of them.⁸ Because of their frequent tendency toward transgression—either by ignoring, contesting, or subverting state power—border regions also implicitly and explicitly call into question the legitimacy of states and their pretences to control an illusionary cartography of territory and population, and the legitimate use of violence therein. Border practices and interactions tell us that state territoriality can never be a linear process, but people living in border zones—subaltern subjects like cross-border migrants and petty traders but also state officials and members of security agencies—engender their own conventions and regulations that exist parallel, conjointly and in opposition to sovereign state claims on space.

Fundamental to our understanding of state–society relations in border zones in the global South is the acknowledgment that claims to sovereignty are always tentative in the face of fragmented and unpredictable configurations of power. Given their tendency for transgression, borderland practices have a strong potential to recalibrate such state–society boundaries and the often violent relations underpinning them. Despite the default setting of the international system, which in many ways is to respect and preserve interstate borders, many of today’s conflicts emanate from borderland regions and call into question the legitimacy of these borders. Whether on the northeast Indian or Afghan–Pakistani border, or in the Great Lakes region, the Horn of Africa, or the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, protracted conflicts have fundamentally challenged political forms associated with the (post)modern nation-state and its project of imposing order and authority on dispersed populations. This book, which emerges from a systematic exchange between several research networks on borders and armed conflict, is a first attempt to bring together evidence from diverse conflict sites in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where state performance has been generally characterized as “weak”, “failed” or “collapsed”.⁹

The originality of this volume lies in the depiction of contemporary violent conflict and state formation on the basis of people’s own experiences at the border, and the way they affect the making and unmaking of political configurations. This includes both descriptions of routinely lived experiences of people inhabiting borderlands and their multiple identifications, spatial logics and relations developed in interaction with diverse political constellations. Contributors to this volume depict such borderland dynamics not just as outcomes of diffusing statehood or globalization, but also as actual political units that generate their own actions and outcomes. Particular attention is paid to the explicit trans-boundary character of conflict and peace presented from a political, geographical, historical, or ethnographic perspective.

The empirical sites of the various borderlands discussed in this volume have in common that they disprove the idea of the unambiguous, unitary sovereignty that a state exclusively holds over a territory: the “modern assumption of ‘hard’ boundaries within which 100 percent sovereignty prevails and beyond which it [disappears] altogether”.¹⁰ Instead of radiating outward from some putative political center,¹¹ the sovereign power of the state seems to represent not much more than “a diffuse glow”,¹² a distant presence¹³ that altogether needs to be asserted and legitimated through everyday performance and interaction with the border inhabitants in place. “If the principal fiction of the nation-state is ethnic, racial, linguistic and cultural homogeneity”, Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall write, “then borders always give the lie to this construct”.¹⁴ And, yet, James Scott reminds us that borderlands are often spaces of multiple sovereignties—spaces where different power holders struggle over control and allegiance of scattered populations. Hegemony has to be worked out, writes Tania Li,¹⁵ and, indeed, the struggle over political power and allegiance has often allowed (forced) people inhabiting these sites to negotiate different loyalties, allegiances and identities between competing norms and regulations (Chapters 5 and 7). Borderlands can become “spaces of refusal”,¹⁶ whereby borderlanders do not necessarily exhibit overt political resistance, but refuse to abide by the geographical framings of the nation-state.

The fact that most sites from sub-Saharan Africa and South and Central Asia that are taken as case studies in the various chapters of this book are all somehow situated in borderlands, sitting on the geographical margins of states, does not mean that we fetishize borders. That would also be a wrong starting point, given that the aim is to deconstruct the institutionalization of political power in places where the boundary between state and society has been contested and is taking an indefinite form. Yet a focus on border zones permits us to simultaneously distinguish them from the metaphorical frontiers of identity, nationalism and state power. Following Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, we regard border zones as sites where the state’s presence has somehow been limited and its monopoly of violence and political authority is finite, unraveling, or subjected to severe contestation. In the vast, loosely populated lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introducing a Borderland Perspective
• Part II: The Border’s Rough Terrain: Violence, Security and the Border
• Part III: The Border as Frontier: States, Sovereignty and Identity
• Part IV: “Bringing the State Back In”: Borders, War Economies and Peace Economies
• Epilogue: The View from the Border
• Notes on Contributors
• Index