Accumulation by Militarization: Land Grabs and the Politics of Dispossession in Pakistan

• In Event: Commodity Frontiers, Land, and Global Production

Abstract

Land was central to colonial modernization. The postcolonial developmental visions, largely influenced by modernization theories, continued these colonial practices. More specifically, the developmental logic that drove postcolonial states’ developmental policies around land believed in land’s continuous valorization and capitalization. Capitalization, as explained through Marxian understanding, could be understood dually: where value in land is mobilized and subsequently land is used to generate value. Capitalization, commodification, and financialization of land are now ubiquitous to contemporary real-estatization and urban development that involve large-scale dispossession of peasants and indigenous communities. As a result, this has generated a large body of work or a “literature rush” on land grabs. However, in this paper I contend that more attention needs to be paid to specific state structures, the development models they spearhead, and their relationship with land dispossessions and local ecologies. Here, I’m referring to the structural conditions imposed by the modalities of authoritarian power under a state structure and their role in shaping the politics of dispossession and local ecologies. A constellation of recent militarized land dispossession cases from Pakistan (in the urban and suburban geographies) —creating what I understand to be representing “militarized regime of dispossession” — thus makes it a suitable case study to pursue this research. In Pakistan, militarized land dispossessions involve elements of Primitive Accumulation (PA), where the military uses extraeconomic measures through local bureaucracies and political elite to dispossess farmers and local communities. Simultaneously, the real-estatization and financialization of land include sophisticated processes of contemporary global capitalism, which makes Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD) relevant too. In this paper, I explore how a comparative understanding of original accumulation and its contemporary counterpart can help analyze the dynamics of what I call “accumulation by militarization.”

Author

• Muhammad Adil Zahoor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign