Government of Peace: Social Governance, Security and the Problematic of Peace by Ranabir Samaddar

Author:Ranabir Samaddar [Samaddar, Ranabir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peace, Political Science, Essays
ISBN: 9781317125372
Google: zA2rCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29443513
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Intersectionality of Rights Regimes

The rights of the ethnic subject, as we have argued, constitute themselves into a regime allowing and privileging only certain kinds of rights while disprivileging and censoring many others. If the region has been a standing witness to violence and insurgency – to a form of oppositional politics equally emerging out of community and ethnic consciousness – it is not because there were no rights but because there were rights which after being constituted into a regime perpetrated its hegemony across the region since Independence. Violence and insurgency are the by-product not of simple absence or denial of rights, but of the presence and hegemony of this particular regime of rights.

Now that the first phase of insurgency is over, the region has been subjected to a new mode of governance particularly since the early 1990s without however completely replacing the partition-based strategies, with its accent on development as the trump of governance. On the one hand, initiatives are being taken to ‘emancipate’ the region from its geographical seclusion inflicted on it by partition and consequent reorganization of international borders – to open it to the ‘powerhouse’ economies of South-east Asia and to reap the benefits that such opening up would entail. On the other hand, emphasis is being given to tap the region’s rich common property resources and subject them to the rule of private property and capital.37 As a sequel to it, the region has experienced a series of social movements across the region organized whether for protesting against the state’s inept handling of floods, earthquakes and similar man-made or natural disasters, corruption, displacement induced by construction of big dams while asking for preserving the already fragile ecology of the region, or for securing land and tenancy rights particularly in upper Assam.

The introduction of new forms and technologies of governance has made the older regime of rights, to say the least, uncertain and rendered it “a conflicted effect of power-knowledge relations, an always achieved, always unravelling subject-effect, its capacity for re-articulation the fraught legacy of discourses and institutions whose commands are variously repeated, obeyed, appropriated and transgressed”.38 This has for the first time in the history of the region inaugurated a new era of struggle for rights. We conducted over 100-odd interviews in upper Assam in early December 2012 with a cross-section of people affected by the construction of a dam in order to understand how they prioritize different kinds of rights – if at all. While all of them barring a few serving directly under district councils symbolizing ethnically constituted spaces admittedly had had their reasons for attachment to the functioning councils, they argued that the right to security of life (under threat due to proposed construction of the dam) prevails over all other rights including their right as a member of any particular community – although none of them is willing to completely relinquish her claim to a right to identity. What will they do with autonomy if they are not alive?

At a time

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.