Pieces of Earth

Description

Resource exploitation in the form of land-grabbing has become a major debate worldwide. Based on extensive field research conducted at the India-Pakistan border, using Kishanganga Hydroelectric Project as a case study, this book on corporate land-grabbing in Kashmir explains how capital is at play in a conflict zone. The author explains how different actors—village elites, government officers, politicians, civil society coalitions, peasants, and the states of India and Pakistan—mobilize support to legitimize their respective claims. It captures how the tensions between developmentalism, environmentalism, and national interest on one hand, and universal rights, national sovereignty, subnational identity, and resistance on the other—facilitate and challenge these corporate resource-grabs simultaneously. The author argues that the patterns and scale of land- and resource-grabbing has led to depeasantization, dispossession, displacement, loss of livelihoods, forced commoditization of the local peasantry, and damages to the local ecology at large. The book thus combines the literature in violence and development and dispossession studies by addressing the socio-political conflict in land- and resource-grabbing in conflict zones.

About the Author

Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail is a Kashmir-based scholar, writer, commentator, policy analyst, and development expert.

Reviews

‘Pieces of Earth ... offers an exceptional empirically rich and analytically sharp study about resource politics in a geographic region that has not received sufficient attention in global land-grabbing literature.’
—Saturnino (‘Jun’) M. Borras Jr. Professor, International Institute of Social Studies
The Hague, Netherlands

‘Pieces of Earth is a significant addition to the literature on the political economy of land acquisition, demonstrating how hydropower-driven land politics results in dispossession, in contested territories such as Kashmir, and shape and are shaped by the reconfiguration of conflict.’
—Haroon Akram-Lodhi
Professor, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada

‘... at a time when the political status of the once princely state of Jammu and Kashmir remains unresolved …. What Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail reveals is the huge impact of the appropriation of its resources, as indicated by the subtitle, The Politics of Land-Grabbing.’
—Victoria Schofield
British author and historian

Table of contents

List of Tables, Maps, and Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Capital in a Disputed Land
2. Global Perspectives on Land-Grabbing
3. Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India
4. From Land Tenure Changes to Land-Grabs
5. Development-Induced Dispossession, Displacement, and Embedded Power Relations
6. Power, Politics, and Struggles over Land
7. Exploitation and Politics of Decision-Making
References
Index
About the Author