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3 - Expertise, Labour, and Mobility in Nepal's Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Law, Construction, and Finance as Domains of Social Transformation
- Edited by Michael Hutt, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Mark Liechty, University of Illinois, Stefanie Lotter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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- Book:
- Epicentre to Aftermath
- Published online:
- 08 July 2021
- Print publication:
- 05 August 2021, pp 49-86
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Summary
Introduction
How have people affected by Nepal's 2015 earthquakes experienced the reconstruction process on the ground? This chapter draws on ethnographic data collected during Nepal's post-earthquake reconstruction to inform theoretical questions about relationships between expertise, labour, and mobility in shaping post-disaster outcomes, including broader societal transformations. Based on a collaborative research project conducted between 2017 and 2020 in three of Nepal's earthquake-affected districts (Bhaktapur, Dhading, and Sindhupalchok), we point to legal, material, and financial processes that constitute lived experiences of reconstruction at the household level.
Since its inception in 2017, our project has explored the domains of law, construction, and finance to ask: How successful has Nepal's ‘owner-driven’ reconstruction model for households been at ensuring positive outcomes, on material, sociocultural, and subjective levels? How have domestic (that is, Nepali national) professionals, such as engineers, lawyers, and non-governmental organization (NGO) staff, served as mediators between earthquake-affected community members and institutional actors implementing reconstruction at the scale of local governance? How have relations of power and their material outcomes been negotiated? How have worldviews and practices been reshaped along the way? And how have fluctuating labour markets and conditions of high mobility shaped these interactions?
Such questions are important both for evaluating the often contradictory outcomes of reconstruction's multiple interventions and for examining the wider sociopolitical context of disaster and relief projects, such as Nepal's post-conflict process of state restructuring that devolved power to local governments in 2017. In this context, we suggest that political and material transformations—at local, regional, and national levels—must be understood as intersecting with each other, rather than as separate trajectories.
As detailed in the introduction to this volume (Liechty and Hutt), Nepal's earthquakes struck at a period of protracted political impasse which politicized and delayed the establishment of a central state agency to coordinate relief efforts by nearly seven months. The National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) only unveiled its first ‘four-phase plan’ in January 2016, and it took another three months for the first housing grants to be released, not least because an entire infrastructure of relief coordination needed to be erected (The Kathmandu Post 2015b, 2016c)
4 - Geography: Securing places and spaces of securitization
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- By Philippe Le Billon, University of British Columbia
- Edited by Philippe Bourbeau, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- Security
- Published online:
- 05 December 2015
- Print publication:
- 24 November 2015, pp 62-89
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Summary
With disciplinary roots in imperialism and the military, geography has long engaged with security issues. As the French geographer Yves Lacoste (1976) famously stated, “La géographie ça sert d'abord à faire la guerre” (Geography serves, first and foremost, to wage war). Mainstream geography grounded in materialist positivism provides spatial information to identify and address a broad range of security risks, including crime and terrorism but also natural disasters, diseases, pollutants, or chronic poverty. In contrast, critical geography drawing from anarchism, feminism, and postmodernism mostly seeks to demonstrate how insecurity is often paradoxically generated by dominant security discourses and practices, while striving to bring about progressive alternatives. Geography is thus not only a discipline deploying spatial analysis to achieve greater security, but also one concerned with the consequences of “securitization” and with emancipatory possibilities for a less vulnerable world. This chapter provides a survey of geography's engagement with concepts of security, charting some of the main questions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies of this broad discipline before discussing some of its strengths and limitations.
Geography has been and remains deeply connected with “official” security agendas (Mamadouh 2004; O'Loughlin and Heske 1991). Tasked with the mission of “knowing the world” and helping to pinpoint the location and movements of threats, geography and geographers have been mobilized in the production of military maps, atlases, and systems of geosurveillance ranging from CCTV to drones and satellites. Indeed, many professional geographers have served, and continue to serve, “national security” agendas – some in the direct employ of the military (Woodward 2005). My own alma mater department at Oxford was the first academic home of Professor Halford Mackinder (of “geographical pivot of history” fame); during the Second World War, the department also played an active role in the British war effort, assembling an odd mix of spatial information – from geological surveys to tourism leaflets – to produce British operational maps. The department, anecdotally, was also said to be a place for MI6 to recruit undergraduates. Geography, from this perspective, is partially a discipline in the service of statecraft – a necessary instrument of spatial analysis in the toolbox of security practices, as seen in the context of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” (Cutter et al. 2003; Flint 2003). Yet geography is also a discipline engaging more broadly with “security.”
2 - The Contested Politics of Iraq's Oil Wealth
- from Part I - The Aftermath of War: Strategic Decisions and Catastrophic Mistakes
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- By Philippe Le Billon, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Edited by Benjamin Isakhan
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- Book:
- The Legacy of Iraq
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 12 July 2015, pp 36-49
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Summary
The Iraq War of 2003 set in motion a series of events that was to have enormous consequences for Iraq's oil sector, its use by political factions and the distribution of its revenue to populations. The US destroyed much of the Iraqi state, turned the country towards ill-defined constitutional federalism, failed to provide a stable security environment, and pushed hard for a liberalisation of the oil sector. Within this broader context, inadequate infrastructure and legal and administrative frameworks for the management of the Iraqi oil sector have meant that recovery in oil production was slow, that much of the revenues did not benefit the population, and that major uncertainties remain over relations between the federal government and regional authorities and over the legality of contracts passed with international oil companies. These legacies will continue to affect the politics and economy of Iraq for decades to come.
On 15 February 2003, millions of people gathered in hundreds of cities around the world to oppose a US- and British-led military invasion of Iraq. Among their main slogans was ‘No more blood for oil’. War, early critics argued, would bring a US-compliant regime and open up to US and British companies Iraq's massive oil wealth: the world's fifth largest oil reserves at 140 billion barrels, and potentially among the most profitable given their relatively low technical production costs (Xu & Bell 2013). Six years after the fall of Baghdad to US troops in April 2003, American and British oil companies were indeed signing major oil exploitation contracts in Iraq for increasing the production of three ‘super-giant’ Iraqi oil fields – Rumaila, West Qurna and Majnoon – while junior oil companies had already taken the opportunity of investing in the Kurdistan region of Iraq at the invitation of a largely autonomous regional government. Concern at a US ‘oil grab’ was also broadly shared within Iraq, where the oil nationalisation of the 1960s remains widely perceived as a proud historical achievement and a guarantee of future sovereignty.
As discussed in this chapter, a foreign take-over of Iraq's oil wealth and the application of neo-liberal policies – premised on the failure of statist policies, the inefficiency and corruption of the public sector, and the need for foreign capital – were at the core of the contested politics of Iraq's oil wealth (Mahdi 2007b; Muttitt 2012).
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