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The book brings to the reader a set of political and social narratives woven around people’s resistance against big dams, mining and industrial projects, in short, displacement and dispossession in Odisha, India. This saga of dispossession abounds with stories and narratives of ordinary peasants, forest dwellers, fisher folk and landless wage laborers, which make the canvas of resistance history more complete. The book foregrounds these protagonists and the events that marked their lives; they live in the coastal plains as well as the hilly and forested areas of south and south-west Odisha. The authors have chronicled the development trajectory from the construction of the Hirakud Dam in the 1950s to the entry of corporations like POSCO and Vedanta in contemporary times. It thus covers extensive ground in interrogating the nature of industrialization being ushered into the state from post-independent India till today. The book depicts how and why people resist the development juggernaut in a state marked with endemic poverty. In unraveling this complex reality, the book conveys the world view of a vast section of people whose lives and livelihoods are tied up to land, forests, mountains, seas, rivers, lakes, ponds, trees, vines and bushes. These narratives fill a yawning gap in resistance literature in the context of Odisha. In doing so, they resonate with the current predicament of people in other mineral-rich states in Eastern India. The book is an endeavour to bring Odisha on the map of resistance politics and social movements in India and across the world.
This book deals with the controversies on developmental aspects of large dams, with a particular focus on the Narmada Valley projects in India. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and research, the author draws on Marxist theory to craft a detailed analysis of how local demands for resettlement and rehabilitation were transformed into a radical anti-dam campaign linked to national and transnational movement networks. The book explains the Narmada conflict and addresses how the building of the anti-dam campaign was animated by processes of collective learning, how activists extended the spatial scope of their struggle by building networks of solidarity with transnational advocacy groups, and how it is embedded in and shaped by a wider field of force of capitalist development at national and transnational scales. The analysis emphasizes how the Narmada dam project is related to national and global processes of capitalist development, and relates the Narmada Valley movement to contemporary popular struggles against dispossession in India and beyond. Conclusions drawn from the resistance to the Narmada dams can be applied to social movements in other parts of the Global South, where people are struggling against dispossession in a context of neoliberal restructuring. As such, this book will have relevance for people with an interest in South Asian studies, Indian politics and Development Studies.
Jeff Halper's book, like his life's work, is an inspiration. Drawing on his many years of directly challenging Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, he offers one of the most insightful analyses of the occupation I've read. His voice cries out to be heard.Jonathan Cook, author of Blood and Religion (2006) and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (2008)In this book, the Israeli anthropologist and activist Jeff Halper throws a harsh light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the point of view of a critical insider. While the Zionist founders of Israel created a vibrant society, culture and economy, they did so at a high price: Israel could not maintain its exclusive Jewish character without imposing on the country's Palestinian population policies of ethnic cleansing, occupation and discrimination, expressed most graphically in its ongoing demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes, both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories.An Israeli in Palestine records Halper's journey 'beyond the membrane' that shields his people from the harsh realities of Palestinian life to his 'discovery' that he was actually living in another country: Palestine. Without dismissing the legitimacy of his own country, he realises that Israel is defined by its oppressive relationship to the Palestinians. Pleading for a view of Israel as a real, living country which must by necessity evolve and change, Halper asks whether the idea of an ethnically pure 'Jewish State' is still viable. More to the point, he offers ways in which Israel can redeem itself through a cultural Zionism upon which regional peace and reconciliation are attainable.
Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594--a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers' fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure. More than a matter of neglect of these farmers and their rights, this "passive nullification" consisted of a blizzard of bureaucratic obfuscation, blatant acts of discrimination and cronyism, violence, and intimidation. Dispossession recovers a lost chapter of the black experience in the American South, presenting a counternarrative to the conventional story of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement.
This book offers a close look at forced evictions, drawing on empirical studies and conceptual frameworks from both the Global North and South. It draws attention to arenas where multiple logics of urban dispossession, violence and insecurity are manifest, and where wider socio-economic, political and legal struggles converge. The authors highlight the need to apply emotional and affective registers of dispossession and insecurity to the socio-political and financial economies driving forced evictions across geographic scales. The chapters each consider the distinct urban logics of precarious housing or involuntary displacements that stretch across London, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Colombo. A timely addition to existing literature on urban studies, this collection will be of great interest to policy makers and scholars of human geography, development studies, and sociology.
Popular struggles in the global south suggest the need for the development of new and politically enabling categories of analysis, and new ways of understanding contemporary social movements. This book shows how social movements in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East politicize development in an age of neoliberal hegemony.
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.
Following the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.
Offers a new reading of the history of the colonization of North America and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples.