Search Results

This chapter considers policy-making beyond the ‘shadow’ of a powerful state. Cross-border policy-making presents a unique dilemma. From the practice perspective, borders open or close to encourage or prevent transnational flows. They can be reshaped to enhance economic growth, social development outcomes, and/or security. From the analytic perspective, the challenge of framing transnational policy-making in open economy sectors, where actors and ideas operate across and beyond borders to shape agendas, policy content, and modes of governing, is a work in progress. Some see policy studies as a ‘methodological prisoner of the state,’ unable to adapt analysis of state capacity to a globalising world. This chapter separates national policy processes from those at the international and global levels. In the context of multiple and diffuse sources of sovereignty at the global level, where porous boundaries between public and private spheres of governance, the conventional dilemmas of policy studies remain but often look importantly different.

This chapter demonstrates how the mapping of a Luso-Hispanic border in the Río de la Plata transformed territorial practices. Following the boundary commissions, colonial officials sought to populate the border with migrants from the Azores and Canary Islands or from the Guarani missions. They promoted sedentism, private property rights, and well-regulated commercial practices, which dovetailed with broader Bourbon and Pombaline Reforms. Spanish officials undertook extermination campaigns against tolderías, while Portuguese officials made frequent pacts with Charrúa and Minuán caciques. Tolderías’ experiences of these efforts derived from their territorial positioning. Those furthest from the border found themselves bereft of the economic and political benefits of competing imperial foes, while those closest to the border were able to take advantage of imperial border-making initiatives.

Chapter Three proceeds as a walk undertaken with the women in Usuthu Gorge, a ward situated at the precise juncture of South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. Framed as an extended narrative, the walk, and the walking songs that accompany it, chronicle women’s lives in the borderlands, linking specific sites and localities to memories about childhood, kinship ties, linguistic identities and women’s livelihood practices. Embedded in this conversation is an intimate exposition of what it means to live at the edge of three nation states, where the political topography and institutional patchiness emerges in its sharpest relief, and where the ecologies of constraint and opportunity affect a constant process of adaptation, hybridity and motion.

(237words) This chapter explores the deepening during World War one of colonial interest in the military, labor and political potential of those it categorized as ‘primitive’ populations. Among these were the ‘hill-men’ of India’s North-East Frontier deployed for militarist border-making both as porters and as informal auxiliaries. But work gangs for road building and expeditionary columns were also drawn from so- called ‘Santhalis’ or ‘aboriginals’, strung along the path of migration eastwards from Bihar and Orissa. Keen to highlight the importance to empire of the North-East Frontier, considered less significant than the North-West Frontier, the Assam government offered to raise ‘primitive hill-men’ labor companies for France. Some ‘hill-men’ chiefs feared the depletion of their retinues, others saw new opportunities unfold. Recruitment set up circuits between local conflicts and new theatres of war, resulting in the prolonged Kuki-Chin uprising of 1917-1919 along the Assam –Burma border. War also intensified the extractive drives of state and capital over forest and mineral resources, as illustrated in a small uprising in Mayurbhanj in Bihar and Orissa in which ‘Santhalis’ were held to be very prominent.. At both sites officials concluded that the resistance of ‘primitive’ populations to war- drives which subjected their persons and re-shaped their environments arose from ‘millenarian’ dreams of autonomy. However ‘primitivity’ also offered rich possibilities for the post-war reconstruction of imperial legitimacy. It was the ground on which certain tracts inhabited by ‘backward populations’ were excluded from the scheme of responsible government introduced in 1919.

(246)The introduction outlines the quest to shed some light on the follower or non-combatant ranks of the Indian Army and to draw upon the approaches of trans-national and connected history to locate India more integrally in the landscapes of World War one. For different reasons, both the colonial regime and the Indian intelligentsia let the figure of ‘the coolie’ and the ‘menial’ follower dissolve into the hyper-masculine figure of the Indian sepoy. Combatant and non-combatant recruitment overlapped. Nevertheless a focus on the follower ranks brings new actors such as convicts , ‘primitives’, and ‘untouchables’ into the story and alerts us to the presence of missionaries and educated Indians in the command structure of the Labor Corps. The long term importance of India’s demographic resources to empire explains why the sending of non-combatants for military use had to be constantly weighed against other objectives equally important to the prosecution of the war: the supply of material resources, the generation of export surpluses and the maintenance of transport infrastructures. Political issues, such as the campaign to abolish indentured migration from India, and the colour-bar in empire, also complicated the supply of non-combatants. The manpower hunger of the war overthrew the boundaries between one form of positioning labor at a work-site and another. Nevertheless some account had to be taken of existing patterns of off-farm work. The need to rationalise manpower- use and to improve the efficiency of the auxiliary services introduced a discourse of modernity to the discussion about post-war military reconstruction.