EVENTS

Towering hydroelectric concrete dams and flood-protection embankments attempt to ‘control and tame’ rivers within nation-state led security framings of their natural transboundary flows. This originates from a very ‘masculinist’ outlook of national hydrocracies to be able to engineer rivers, materialising and embedding concrete border walls on the river basin, through large-scale ‘infrastructure development’ and ‘hydraulic-mission’ paradigms. This seminar explores the idea of riparian infrastructure development and control as an extension of bordering practices by the nation-state, deploying national-security discourses and narratives towards legitimising such interventions. Such bordering practices have political, ecological, and economic impacts on an international scale, and at the same time have layered effects within the nation-state container. The announcement by China and India to build mega dams on their respective stretches of the Brahmaputra River basin, demonstrates such bordering effects on transboundary river basins, particularly in the context of the fragile Himalayan bioregion/ecoregion. The construction of mega hydropower dam projects by China and India have been viewed as projects of national pride and importance and serve as ‘sovereignty markers’ on their respective stretches of shared river basins. The flood-protection embankments within their territorial limits make for additional bordering effects upon upstream and downstream riparian communities, accentuating politics of economic inclusion and exclusion, and engineering flood-related disasters over time. The understanding of dams and embankments as border walls, makes for an analysis of the ecological ruptures that such riparian infrastructure development has inflicted on transboundary river basins.

Speaker

Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman holds a PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences from IIT Guwahati, Assam. His research interests include transboundary Himalayan ecology, bioregionalism/ecoregionalism, politics of development infrastructures, migration, borderland communities and transboundary water sharing and management issues between China, India, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. He is a Visiting Associate Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.

Chair

Nimmi Kurian is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Her research focuses on Asian borderlands and looks specifically at the intersections between capital and ecology, federalism and foreign policy, resources and rights. Dr. Kurian is a member of the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute, The New School, New York and has served on the Fellowship Committee of the China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, Centre for China Studies, Ashoka University. She has held Fellowships from the India China Institute, The New School, New York, and the Charles Wallace India Trust. Dr. Kurian has written and published widely on alternative spatial imaginations, a theme that is explored in detail in her two books, India-China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre (Sage, 2014) and India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security (co-author) (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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