Land Grabs in Urban Bangladesh: Acquisition by Belief, Blood, Bullet, Button, and Bureaucracy

• In Event: 3167 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Land Grabbing and Dispossession

Abstract

In this paper, I explore a seventy-year-long history of land grabbing strategies practiced in Bangladesh. I examine how land dispossession reinforces the capitalist system and exacerbates urban inequalities. I argue that land grabbing is one of the most practiced modes of accumulating capital and power in Bangladesh. I also argue that land grabbing not only displaces and dispossesses the poor and middle class but also a particular group of elite belonged to minority communities and affiliated to the opposition political party.

I explore coercive and deceptive land grabbing strategies by drawing on a wide variety of literature on land dispossession as well as empirical evidence collected from the capital city Dhaka. I use four different sets of data in this paper: life histories of the dispossessed people; a land use survey; interviews of different professionals; and, archival and historical documents. I engage some theories of land dispossession to examine the nature of land grabs, capitalist relations, and urban inequalities in Bangladesh, including Marx’s (1887) theory of primitive accumulation, Harvey’s (2003) theory of accumulation by dispossession, and Levien’s (2018) theory of regimes of dispossession.

Finally, I identify five different mechanisms of land grabbing: belief, blood, bullet, button, and bureaucracy. First, the state and other land grabbers in Bangladesh historically label religious /ethnic minorities as “enemy” (i.e., belief) and justify their grabbing of land owned by those minority communities. Second, land grabbers in many cases use their primary kinship ties (i.e., blood) to grab land owned by the powerless. Next, organized criminals often grab land by violently killing people (i.e., bullet). Fourth, people who have political, military, executive, and judiciary power also use their status markers (i.e., button) to grab land. Finally, various government agencies/officials (i.e., bureaucracy) grab land in the name of development, crime control, and other commercial purposes.

Author

• Lipon Kumar Mondal, Virginia Tech