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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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In the Name of Sovereignty: Displacement and State Making in Zimbabwe's Margins
| Panel |
37. Political Economies of Displacement in Southern Africa
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| Paper ID | 462 |
| Author(s) |
Hammar, Amanda
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Southern African landscapes are marked by countless overlapping histories of displacement, migration and emplacement. Crude forms of conquest, dispossession and violent displacement that distinguished much of the colonial period (as well as predating it) have only partly been replaced in postcolonial times – in non-war settings – by more subtle practices of capture and control of territories, resources and populations. Contemporary forms of governmentality attend 'humanely' to state concerns for surveillance, order, development and welfare of populations within national boundaries, but simultaneously displace vast numbers of selected citizens, often violently, in the name of progress, security, and sovereignty.
This paper examines the critical relationship between shifting resource regimes, forced displacement and state making in the margins. It is anchored empirically in a particular case of forced displacement in Zimbabwe’s northwest agrarian margins in the late 1990s; a case of violent eviction by the local government authority of migrant farmers living in a communal area on the borders of a national park, and subsequent attempts by the evictees to re-establish themselves in the same area. Without losing focus on the particularities of this example, it is nonetheless situated in relation to much older and broader patterns of forced removal and migration of varied provenance since colonial times, as well as in relation to more recent practices of state-generated violent displacement both in Zimbabwe’s rural areas and urban margins.
Making the connections across time and space, the paper argues that displacement (or even the threat of displacement) is critical to how states assert sovereignty and attempt to control people, resources and territories. However, it further argues that such processes of state making are neither linear nor smooth, but are contested and shaped in significant (and similarly uneven) ways by the heterogeneous people, resources and spaces that displacement aims to affect.
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