Border, Development and Dispossessed Agency

Biswajit Mohanty

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2023, vol. 38, issue 4, 563-584

Abstract: Every collective social and political action undertaken by citizens and non-citizens within the border spaces is a border act that can be illustrated through ample instances. The border act demonstrates people's collective and cooperative consciousness to sustain, construct, recreate, negotiate and resist borders. The border studies have focussed on the sustenance of the edge through surveillance systems, construction, and reconstruction of borders through symbolic tropes and meaning attribution by different sets of actors experiencing them spatially and temporally. The passivity of agency remains the sub-text in border studies. Long neglected in the border studies literature, the essay examines a different set of agentic actors – the dispossessed people – produced by the development processes and projects undertaken by the public and private companies to uplift the impoverished, underdeveloped regions and persons that became part of the internal border formation. The article illustrates how the internally dispossessed agencies’ contestation of the dominant and hegemonic value of development through their struggle against development projects initiated by the formal state and non-state actors retains the potential to change institutionalised behaviors to reclaim their rights to livelihood.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2022.2101139

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