Search

The contributions in this issue forward a nuanced exposition of how the production of racial difference in India buttresses and is reproduced through Hindu nationalist, casteist, and colonial projects that generate tacit or explicit consent for continued violence against racialized others. At the same time, the articles look transnationally, examining how regional forms of racial difference marked by caste and tribe, for instance, have long articulated with historical forms of global racial capitalism. Ultimately, this special issue attends to the narratives and experiences of those living at the margins, who strategically deploy racial concepts to build international solidarity movements beyond the narrow confines of the nation-state. In so doing, it hopes to derive insights on the necessity of transnational translations, even as it directs renewed attention to the specificity of regional hierarchies that shape everyday life and death in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would abolitionism mean for climate justice? "Resilience" is proposed by experts as a solution to climate change vulnerability. But this prescription tends to focus on adaptation to future external threats, subtly validating embedded processes of racial capitalism that have historically dehumanised and endangered residents and their environments in the first place. This article focuses on majority Black areas said to be vulnerable to extreme weather events and targeted for expert‐driven resilience enhancements in America's capital city, Washington, DC. Drawing on key insights from Black radical, feminist, and antiracist humanist thought, we reimagine resilience through an abolitionist framework. Using archival analysis, oral histories, a neighbourhood‐level survey, and interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018, we argue that abolitionist climate justice entails a centring of DC's historical environmental and housing‐related racisms, the intersectional drivers of precarity and trauma experienced by residents beyond those narrowly associated with "climate"; and an ethics of care and healing practiced by those deemed most at risk to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies Cape Town's new slum "reblocking" paradigm, in which settlements are reorganized, housing upgraded, and services delivered in situ. Though not without structural and long-term challenges, research shows that for those waiting for post-apartheid housing, reblocking provides an alternative to eviction and resettlement. Through primary and secondary research over 2014–2016 on four reblocking pilot projects covering six hundred households, we argue that reblocking hinges not on consensus but rather the "productive tension" generated in the negotiation of visions and outcomes. We draw on critical theories of agonism and participation to suggest that such tension plays a role in producing legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corruption politics have received little attention in human geography. We offer a critical geography of corruption as an alternative to economistic framings that take corruption as an objective set of deviant practices mostly besetting states in the Global South. Instead, we theorize corruption as a historically shifting, subjective discourse about the abuse of entrusted power. Geographic and cognate disciplinary approaches reveal how corruption narratives become politicized and yoked to symbolic, material, and territorial regimes of power. We suggest that recent theories of urban informality provide a revealing lens into the ethico-politics and territorial struggles of contemporary capitalism across the North and South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the nature of political agency deployed at sites of market-oriented water reforms. It presents a case study from Bangalore, India of a water project mandating significant 'beneficiary' cash contributions from lower-middle-class dwellers for the capital cost of extending piped water to the city's peripheries. Drawing on quantitative and ethnographic data, it illustrates why property owners who lack formal water access and land tenure - groups referred to in this article as the 'peripheralized middle class' - consent to paying for pipes rather than resist all together despite the high cost involved. It argues that far from reflecting an internalization of a 'willingness to pay' or 'stakeholder' ethos celebrated by development practitioners today, payment for water provides an insurgent means to bargain for greater symbolic recognition, respectability and material benefits from the state. In particular, payment for pipes enables peripheral dwellers to strengthen their claims to secure land tenure in an era of exclusionary and punitive spatial policies. Payment thus comprises a terrain of contested meaning making and political struggle, at the heart of which lie the stakes of urban citizenship. In documenting the process by which property related interests and tenure claims are advanced under a scenario of reforms, this article contributes to Gramscian political-ecological conversations on subaltern political agency and the lived character of hegemony in urban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the phenomenon of Bangalore's urban 'water mafias', operators who extract and deliver groundwater to scores of informal residential areas in Indian cities. The term 'mafia' here is treated as a semantic area of situated meanings and cultural interpretations that needs to be historicised and prised open in order to better understand how the urban waterscape is produced and inhabited. It situates the provenance and workings of mafias within wider debates on urban informality, state formation, and urban infrastructure and space. Rather than seeing mafias as filling a gap where government water supply has failed, as mainstream narratives suggest, the paper argues that mafias must be seen as formative of the post-colonial state. It further suggests that the specific form of public authority exercised by water mafias explains the production of informality in Bangalore's waterscape. Based on ethnographic research in 2007-2009, the paper characterises the everyday authority wielded by mafias along three main registers: (i) the ability of mafias to make and break discursive and material boundaries between the formal and informal, public and private, and state and society, (ii) the varied nature of mafias' political practices, ranging from exploitation to electoral lobbying to social protection to the provision of welfare, and iii) mafias' complicity in both water and land regimes in a neo-liberalised urban political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]