Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession: Local Resistance in South & East Asia, the Pacific & Africa - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783609435 ISBN 13: 9781783609437

Publisher: Zed Books, 2017

Synopsis

Under the guise of 'development', a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life.

In this provocative new collection, engaged scholars and activists combine grounded case studies with both Marxist and anti-colonial analyses, suggesting that the developmental project is a continuation of the colonial project. The authors then demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession in the rural belt, thereby contributing essential movement-relevant knowledge on these experiences in the Global South.

A vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of resistance, this book addresses academics and analysts who have either minimized or overlooked local resistances to colonial capital, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions.

About this title

About the Author

Dip Kapoor is a professor in international development education at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is also a board member at the Center for Research and Development Solidarity (CRDS), an organisation in Odisha, India which advocates for peasant and Adivasi-Dalit communities. His previous books include NGOization (Zed 2013) as well as the edited collections Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization (Zed 2015) and Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession (Zed 2017).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession

Local Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa

By Dip Kapoor

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Zed Books
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78360-943-7

Contents

About the contributors, 
1 Local resistance to colonization and rural dispossession in South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa Dip Kapoor, 
2 Waponahki anti-colonial resistance in North American colonial contexts: some preliminary notes on the coloniality of meta-dispossession Rebecca Sockbeson, 
PART I: SOUTH AND EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC REGION, 
3 Sovereignty politics in Samoa: fa'asamoa, fa'amatai, and resistance to colonial capital and dispossession of customary land and place Naomi Gordon, 
4 Adivasi, Dalit, and non-tribal forest dweller (ADNTFD) resistance to bauxite mining in Niyamgiri: displacing capital and state-corporate mining activism in India Dip Kapoor, 
5 Our crops speak: small and landless peasant resistance to agro-extractive dispossession in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia Hasriadi Masalam, 
6 Dispossession and neoliberal disaster reconstruction: activist NGO and fisher resistance in Nagapattinam, Tamil Nadu Raja Swamy and Prema Revathi, 
7 Lumad anti-mining activism in the Philippines Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, 
8 Coal power and the Sundarbans in Bangladesh: subaltern resistance and convergent crises Sourayan Mookerjea and Manoj Misra, 
PART II: AFRICAN REGION, 
9 Resisting accumulation by dispossession: organization and mobilization by the rural poor in contemporary South Africa Lalitha Naidoo, Gilton Klerck, and Kirk Helliker, 
10 Food sovereignty through ecofeminism: re-commoning as resistance to agribusiness dispossession in Kenya Leigh Brownhill, Wahu Kaara, and Terisa Turner, 
11 Guided by the Yomo spirit: resistance to accumulation by dispossession of the Songor salt lagoon in Ada, Ghana Jonathan Langdon and Kofi Larweh, 
12 Contesting dispossession: land rights activism in Gambella, Ethiopia, and Pujehun, Sierra Leone Rachel Ibreck, 
13 Local resistance to large-scale agricultural land acquisitions in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia Tsegaye Moreda, 
14 All that glitters: neoliberal violence, small-scale mining, and gold extraction in northern Tanzania Zahra Moloo, 
15 'Oloibirinization', collective identity, and the future of multilocal resistance in the Niger Delta Temitope B. Oriola, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

LOCAL RESISTANCE TO COLONIZATION AND RURAL DISPOSSESSION IN SOUTH AND EAST ASIA, THE PACIFIC, AND AFRICA

Dip Kapoor

Contemporary contestation and resistance by indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, small or landless peasants, pastoralists, fishers, marginal castes and ethnicities, and precariously positioned farm labor addressing colonial capitalist development displacement and dispossession in parts of the Asia-Pacific and Africa, however politically (un)spectacular, is common but seldom acknowledged. This perpetuates the untenable notion, both politically and theoretically, of an uncontested compliance or resignation, or a willing acceptance of loss of territory and customary land, if not a sense of place, history, and sociocultural presence.

Euro-American experiences of development and progress realized through liberal conceptions of land as private property characteristic of capitalist social relations and modes of production are, in the alleged absence of contestation equated with this relative silence, positively affirmed and subsequently prescribed as the universally applicable political-economic destination. The role of the repeated violence (including genocidal) of multiple dispossessions and forced (or bribed and manipulated) occupations and political-economic restructuring continually enforcing five centuries of Western colonial capitalism is obscured in such a politics, which normalizes colonization as a necessary social force of constant and (un)civil compulsion in matters pertaining to the lives of the colonial-dispossessed, while denying any explicit recognition of resistance and contestation to such violence by those being dispossessed.

These Euro-colonial political and theoretical projects have always been resisted and challenged on material grounds by the 'wretched of the earth' (Fanon 1963), or those being compelled, manipulated, or invited to commit social and political-economic suicide in the face of a supposed inevitability regarding their necessary demise. Anti-colonial resistance has taken on various forms in different regions and scales over the course of five centuries of Western colonialism, including: (1) the defense of, and by, pre-existing states of their polities against Western expansion; (2) popular and often violent nativist uprisings and reactions to Western interference and imposition of institutions and customs via militant or missionary Christianity; (3) slave revolts (e.g. African and Creole) against plantation owners and masters; (4) issue-specific ameliorative uprisings exposing a colonial injustice in the interests of reform/concessions; and (5) organized movements and violence against colonial regimes for national independence (Benjamin and Hidalgo 2007: 59).

Engaged academics, activists, and journalists in Against Colonization and Dispossession: Local Resistance in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa attempt to register contemporary and predominantly organized and open democratic rural resistances, struggles, or movements addressing: primitive accumulation (Marx1867/1990); ongoing accumulation by dispossession (ABD) (Harvey 2003); and the exploitation of 'unfree' labor (landless and marginal peasants/exploited farm wage labor and fishers) (Brass2011) as continued colonial theft integral to a coloniality of power exercised through the development project and a globalizing capitalism (Fanon 1963; Nkrumah 1965/1971; Quijano 2000;Rodney 1982) in the Euro-colonial political geographies of South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.

Colonialism is understood as material and ideological racialized dispossession, domination, and exploitation that persists beyond the national achievement of official independence of the so-called Third World or the Darker Nations (Prashad 2008) in the twentieth century, to include continuing and new forms of neocolonialism (Nkrumah 1965/1971) on an international or global scale, contrary to the suggestion of postcolonial ruptures in the post-national independence period. Speaking to the situations of the indigenous,Huanani-Kay Trask (1993/1999: 102–103, emphasis added) expresses this as follows:

I have defined neocolonialism as the experience of oppression at a stage that is nominally identified as independent or autonomous. I use nominally to underscore the reality that independence from colonial power is legal but not economic [e.g. continued Anglo-American legal and land tenure systems in places as diverse as the Philippines, Fiji and parts of Africa]. ... it is the ideological position that all is well; in other words, that decolonization has occurred. Therefore, problems and conflicts are post-colonial and the fault of the allegedly independent peoples. Nothing could be more inaccurate.

... we are surrounded by other, more powerful nations that desperately want our lands and resources and for whom we pose an irritating problem. This is just as true for the Indians of the Americas as it is for the tribal people of India and the aborigines of the Pacific. This economic reality is also a political reality for most if not all indigenous peoples. The relationship between ourselves and those who want to control us and our resources is not a formerly colonial relationship but an ongoing colonial relationship.

This process includes ongoing internal colonial relations (Casanova1965) of domination (the source of such structural control is primarily from within national containers) between state-corporate actors, the comprador bourgeois classes and racialized social groups, and classes within states and regions, reproducing historical inequalities and projects of subjugation through development or market violence, land theft, exploitation, and cultural invasion (Benjamin and Hidalgo 2007; Fanon 1963; Guha 1983/1999,1990).

It is therefore generally understood, if not explicitly acknowledged across the contributions in this collection, that the current expression of this process as land grabbing and ABD is neither novel nor a break from the historical colonial capitalist project in these regions. ABD is continually reproduced as racialized colonial dispossession through an unrelenting project of developmentalism. That is:

much like our understandings of European conquest in the Americas, contemporary land grabbing is not simply an economic project. We would do well to remember that the myth of empty lands is a racial metaphor marking the racialized dispossession and genocide of the region's first inhabitants by European powers. ... understanding land grabbing as a critique of development demands recognition of the spatial and temporal continuities of grabbing as a historical geography of race. (Mollett 2015: 427)

This observation is in keeping with and is variously utilized by several contributors to this collection in relation to specific histories and political-geographical contexts, and in terms of what the Black Radical Tradition (Hudson 2016) in the Caribbean and the United States (African diasporic contributions) has found noteworthy, which is that '[c]apitalism and racism, did not break from the old order (slavery, feudalism) but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of "racial capitalism" dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide' (Kelley 2000: xxiii; Robinson2000). Racial inferiority is concretized through the interlocking processes of racially targeted land theft and exploitation of colored labor, as evidenced by the mercantile capitalist forced Atlantic slave labor migration of some 30 million Africans (only 11 million survived the journey) to the New World, including Jamaica and the British West Indies, described by the then British Secretary of State as 'a traffic so beneficial to the nation' (Delgado Wise and Veltmeyer 2016: 56).

Local rural resistance to colonization and dispossession

The revolt against colonial capitalism and imperialism has much to learn from the struggles and movements of communal peasant societies in rural geographies (Patel 2006) as it does from indigenous/land-based sovereignties that continue to be at the front line of dispossession, along with ongoing forms of ABD in peri/urban (rural extensions) locations and destinations in the 'planet of slums' (Davis 2006) and the struggles of variously racialized urban poor migrant workers (Choudry and Hlatshwayo2016).

GRAIN (www.grain.org) and Food First (www.foodfirst.org) continue to support and document land, water, and green grabs, and the resistance by indigenous peoples, fisherfolk, pastoralists, farm workers, and migrant labor, and the implications for food and hunger (see The Great Food Robbery) and the politics of Food Sovereignty. War on Want, meanwhile, has documented and politicized (see The Hunger Games) the questionable role of DFID (Department for International Development, UK) aid and its alleged complicity with agribusiness (Monsanto, Unilever, Syngenta, Diageo, SABMiller) interests through public–private partnerships, dispossessing small and marginal farming groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. A study by Oxfam in 2011 suggests that an area the size of Western Europe (227 million hectares) has been sold or leased since 2001, involving mostly international state-corporate investors (e.g. 125 million hectares have been grabbed by rich countries for outsourcing agricultural production alone in Africa), while GRAIN's most recent study (July 2016), building on research from 2008, documents 500 current land-grab deals across78 countries (around US$94 billion in farmland investments) and over 30 million hectares (the size of Finland).

This period has witnessed a vast expansion of bourgeois land rights ... through a global land grab unprecedented since colonial times ... as speculative investors now regard 'food as gold' and are acquiring millions of hectares of land in the global South. (Araghi and Karides 2012: 3)

And this does not include, for instance, contemporary colonial capitalist dispossession via the global mining industry (Moody2013).

Local resistance to colonial capitalist dispossession in South and East Asia, the Pacific, and Africa by indigenous peoples (nations), forest/tribes and ethnicities, pastoralists and hunter gatherers, small/landless (women) peasants, and fishers and farm workers facing precarious labor conditions in/out of small-scale peasant agriculture and wage labor includes cases addressing: colonial occupations of indigenous territories (lands and peoples) of genocidal implications and struggles for indigenous sovereignty/nations (Waponahki in North America; Samoa); mining (salt/Ghana; gold/Tanzania; oil/Nigeria; bauxite/India; gold-coppernickel/Philippines; coal-conservation grabs/Bangladesh); agricultural/plantation land grabs and precarious farm/plantation labor (coconut plantations/Indonesia; citrus fruits and vegetables/South Africa; coffee plantations/Kenya; palm oil and rubber/Sierra Leone; rice/Ethiopia; maize/Ethiopia); and tsunami disaster relief and the dispossession of coastal fishers (India).

Local resistance is not used to suggest any kind of explicit spatial nor political binding or exclusivity. Activists and contributors work with a broad appreciation, vertical and horizontal, of resistance formations in relation to the spatial and political workings of colonial capital recognizing the challenges of organizing both horizontally across tribes/ethnicities, castes, gender, non/class, small landless cultivator-emergent wage labor, if not vertically with regional and inter/national actors. Similar attention is required vertically in relation to guerilla activisms, local or international political groups, civil society actors (I/NGOs and academic/research-activists), media, national organizations, and international actors (human rights coalitions/agents), if not pertinent state structures. Local resistance, if anything, is a political attempt to flag and make conspicuous the struggles of those who are being directly affected by colonial capitalist dispossessions in the rural belt as being the primary agents of (dis)organized and sporadic or planned long- and short-term pushback and resistance, given that this is where the brunt of primitive accumulation and colonial violence is continually felt. It would not be an exaggeration to reference the contexts being discussed in this collection as low- to high-intensity war zones; the daily reality for those who have to try to live, sleep, and eat in an atmosphere of continuous insecurity and prospects of being killed.

The importance of recognizing the primacy of the activism of those directly affected (and in the line of fire in the locale) has been brought up by activists in these locations for political reasons. A point made in this regard has to do with how cooptation or disarticulation of the aims of the struggle or the seizure of the political profile and achievements of the struggle by sympathetic actors at different scales can deflate activism at the heart of the movement formation. This also provides state-corporate actors with a chance to dismiss these struggles as being the work of foreign meddlers or as being instigated by more established left movements (see Chapter 7 by Rodriguez on the Philippines and Chapter 4 by Kapoor on India, on this tactic). With reference to the major mobilizations against capitalist globalization in North America more recently, Vijay Prashad (2003) illustrates the general point regarding recognition of primary political agency when he raises the question, 'Who is at the frontlines of the struggles?' in order to underscore the politics of activism as it relates to the importance of the front-line activism of people of color and the working poor versus other actors in major 'global justice' mobilizations:

The question is not just about gaps that have opened up between those who demonstrate and those who don't, but between those who think they are at the frontlines when they toss the tear gascanisters back at the police and those who face routine political disenfranchisement, economic displacement, social disdain, and yet spend their days in their own forms of fight-back. (p. 194)

Furthermore, the current political and theoretical insistence regarding the global or transnational scale and the unproblematic appreciations of scaling up imperatives (un)wittingly colonizes the material and ideological terms of protest and resistance by those waging the war at the points of dispossession on many an occasion, despite expressed political empathies and solidarities across multiple points of political and spatial differences. Aziz Choudry (2015), in a similar vein, refers to the tendency toward a colonial amnesia, for instance, when it comes to indigenous exclusions in social movement organizing in metropolitan centers.

In fact, in ideological and material terms, as global and trans-national colonial capitalists reproduce the propagandist conception of placelessness or absorb place into the more ambiguous idea of space as a product of coloniality in the interests of a politics of capitalist accumulation, for those facing the prospects of potential eradication in these maneuvers, (re)establishing and (re)affirming a sense of place as specificity and the immediate local affiliation and meaning of land, ecology, history, ancestry, and spiritual grounding is understandably, and politically speaking, paramount. In fact, most front-line activists in these locations are wary of attempts by transnational activists to establish terms of resistance in more national or global terms, again out of political necessity for the latter perhaps, given that capital does not recognize such spatial limits. The political dismissal of such placebased struggles as ethnocentric or essentialist and conservative, however, demands (speaking in dialectical terms) that global-centric critics also scrutinize the essentialist and ethnocentric political-economic and socio-cultural impositions of a colonial capitalist modernity project over several centuries in multiple locations in relation to, as opposed to in isolation from, an anti-colonial politics of place-based pushback.

The struggles being considered in this collection are lesser known internationally, with the exception perhaps of the Niger Delta and the long-standing claims of the Lumad in Mindanao (see Chapter15 by Oriola on Nigeria and Chapter 7 by Rodriguez on the Philippines, respectively). Contributors are all either engaged academics who have worked with the same struggles in one capacity or another or with similar struggles in these regions (Kapoor 2009), if not elsewhere, while contributing to political and research conversations for movements and academia. Some participants are activists or are engaged with popular media working for these struggles in whatever their stage of germination. Contributors have relied on firsthand experiences, research-based primary documentation, and secondary sources to illuminate, politically speaking, relatively inconspicuous struggles and to provide political insights concerning resistance to dispossession in remote locations where the strong arm of state-corporate agents of dispossession operates with impunity in the interests of accumulation. Direct action and open democratic resistance, with all their risks, expose these transgressions where and when possible. Developing the case studies for this collection has been a challenging exercise on many counts, a primary one being the political necessity to measure what is said or shared, and what should not or cannot be shared in the name of political vigilance, as these are ongoing long-term and contemporary struggles.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783609435
• ISBN 13: 9781783609437
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Kapoor Dip