Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects*

Abstract

In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development.

Mapping historical and contemporary agrarian transformations and capitalist infiltration in a complex upland environment: A case from eastern Nepal

“…Mountain regions, for example, can be prime sites of large‐scale land acquisition by capital, the extreme aspect of so‐called “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, ). The classic examples include hydropower development, which is particularly relevant in upland regions of South‐East Asia (Barney, ) and India (Nilsen, ). Other examples include mineral extraction, as Perreault () reviews with respect to the Bolivian Andes.…”

Towards a critical geography of resettlement

“…What a political economy lens does, therefore, is expand the gaze beyond a narrow, prescriptive focus on resettlement as a spatially and temporally bounded event, drawing attention to the key drivers and modalities of land dispossession and resettlement. For example, private capital – both foreign and domestic – and a reconfigured neoliberal state are identified as the key drivers of the Maheshwar hydropower project that displaced some 35,000 people in India (Nilsen, 2008). In this case, resettlement was induced by processes of privatisation of public utilities and liberalisation of the financial sector; resettlement did not begin and end with a project.…”