Governing a Liminal Land Deal: The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Gender

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a surge in large‐scale land acquisitions around the world. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that many of the prominent land deals signed during the global land rush are struggling to materialise. This emergent pattern of liminality has important implications for understanding the everyday, contingent, and gendered processes of land deal governance and subject formation. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the gendered governance of a “liminal” land deal in coastal Tanzania, through a case of the EcoEnergy Sugar Project. It shows how the project's prolonged delay has given rise, over time, to two contradistinctive sets of actors and mechanisms of control: biopolitical interventions of international development consultants focused on livelihood improvements, and necropolitical interventions of district paramilitary forces focused on surveillance and violence. While seemingly contradictory, I argue that both enactments of power fundamentally relied on and reproduced normative gender in rural Tanzania.

Geographies of uncertainty

“…This is not to say that human geographers have not recently taken up many of the substantive themes that are of interest in transdisciplinary debates. Indeed, engagements with experiences of liminality, protracted uncertainty and indeterminacy within the subdiscipline have become increasingly wide-ranging in their ambit, investigating questions on migration and refugee resettlement ( Loyd et al, 2018 , Mountz et al, 2002 ), development ( Chung, 2017 , Chung, 2020 ), climate futures and the Anthropocene ( Nightingale, 2018 ), neoliberalism ( Anderson et al, 2020 ), identity and selfhood ( March, 2020 ), and humanitarianism ( Newhouse, 2017 ).…”

“…By destabilizing binary identity categories, this work documents how illegibility and in-betweenness are experienced and produced through space. In dialogue with this work, other scholars investigate how uncertainty generates new forms of social difference and subjectivity that reinforce patterns of vulnerability ( Auyero, 2009 , Chung, 2020 ). Together this work encourages us to think more deeply about uncertainty as a lived and spatiotemporal condition and prompts us to engage with the disorienting and sometimes potentially deadly consequences of being in-between.…”

Corporate Repertoires of Control and Performances of Power in a Contested Land Deal in Senegal

“…Multiparty democracies with a relatively strong civil society, such as Senegal, may be more responsive to resistance movements that challenge land deals and, by the same token, their electoral legitimacy (Gagné 2019). However, African states with authoritarian tendencies such as Tanzania, Cameroon, and Ethiopia have also recently severely criticized inefficient investors or terminated unproductive land projects (Chung 2020;GRAIN 2018;Dejene & Cochrane 2021). Wherever they operate, companies must therefore actively cultivate state support to obtain and retain land.…”

“…Second, land control over large areas implies exerting power over local populations (Chung 2020;Millar 2018), an undertaking that is not as straightforward as it may seem. Power is a relational process.…”

“…A key facet of power consists of shaping "perceptions, cognitions and preferences" to forestall the formation of grievances (Lukes 2005:28). The diverse forms of power are reflected in the manifold strategies employed by land investors in their relations with local populations, ranging, for instance, from the use of physical force to keep resistance in check, to the provision of training programs for generating alternative sources of income, to promises of financial compensation for the loss of land (Ahmed et al 2017;Chung 2020;Millar 2018). These strategies are unevenly successful, as people can not only resist land companies but also try to further their own interests when partaking in these projects.…”