Dams, Development, and Racialised Internal Peripheries: Hydraulic Imaginaries as Hegemonic Strategy in Pakistan

Abstract

Dams and other large water infrastructures are more than mere technical projects in Pakistan. They carry a special symbolic burden and are understood by the state as vectors of modernisation. This paper interrogates the making of a statist hydraulic imaginary in Pakistan in the 1960s and its continued relevance today. This imaginary posits a technocratic state as the protagonist in a national narrative of hydro‐modernisation. I argue that the production and dissemination of an imaginary of racialised internal peripheries as places of developmental backwardness is central to the Pakistani state’s infrastructural interventions. I analyse images and narratives from state produced magazines and videos by contextualising them with respect to the cultural politics of hegemony. The paper advances debates in critical infrastructure studies via a critical reading of Antonio Gramsci’s incomplete essay on the “Southern Question”. It develops a tradition of cultural historical materialism—largely neglected by critical water geographers—attuned to the articulation of geographic unevenness, hegemony, and racial difference.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and Securitisation in a Postcolony Frontier Space

“…In this article I have argued that statecraft in the Karakoram has bypassed normative law and administration, and has been periodically accompanied by calibrated violence, evidenced in the impunity that religious militias and banned sectarian groups have enjoyed, as well as in the use of anti‐terrorism legislation against social protest. And as accompanying articles in this issue illustrate, in the present epoch infrastructure and securitisation is a state project linked to uneven development and extraction, financial and legal regimes, ideas of modernity and efficiency (Akhtar 2022; Akhter 2022; Hong 2022).…”

“…Currently, China’s investments in the Karakoram are directed towards two dam construction projects along the Karakoram Highway: the Diamer‐Basha Dam and the Dasu Hydropower Project. Here, Chinese SOEs Hydro China and Power China partner with Pakistan’s FWO and the Water and Power Development Authority (Akhter 2022; Dawn 2019; The News 2020). The Karakoram Highway was always securitised infrastructure.…”

“…It serves as a backdrop not to extraordinary, but to everyday experiences: routine movement, use of public space and public transport, lawful assembly and protest. The causal relationships I identify, violence and authority, dispossession and capitalism, irregular mobility and security, are not unique to the Karakoram, but exist variously in borderlands, internal peripheries, and under settler colonialism (Akhtar 2022; Akhter 2022; Aradau 2016; LaDuke and Cowen 2020). Infrastructure is the “material systems that engineer and sustain” these frequently violent political economies (LaDuke and Cowen 2020:253).…”

The Spatial Politics of Infrastructure‐Led Development: Notes from an Asian Postcolony

“…Ahmad (2022) dismantles the concept of a homogenous Punjab as a core region by examining the ecological and cultural dimensions of the ethno‐nationalist Siraiki movement in South Punjab. Akhter (2022) analyses the periphery not primarily in terms of political economy, but rather through the cultural production of the internal periphery as a racialised region in the statist hydraulic imaginary. The contributions share an awareness of the highly uneven and fractured geographies of Pakistani national space—and how state and military infrastructures produce and maintain these spaces and bodies as peripheral.…”

“…Indeed, much of the work around contested environments (and especially water resources) has turned around the analysis of various infrastructures and technologies, as well as the engineers and technical specialists who plan, operate, and maintain these systems (Furlong 2011). Akhter’s (2022) essay continues this focus on the politics of water infrastructures. Instead of focusing on the experts or even the users of water infrastructures, however, he puts the spotlight on the visual and cultural dimensions of state projects—especially as they involve racialised representations.…”