Energy at the Edge of the State. Extractivism, Agropastoralism, and the Making of Frontiers

Developmental ambitions and growing energy demands have led to a significant expansion of energy and extractive frontiers into rural areas, particularly where access to “cheap” nature is viable and coercive mechanisms of dispossession are easier to implement. In the border areas of Pakistan and India, this expansion has resulted in the appropriation of land and resources from agropastoralists, leading to a reconfiguration of agropastoral economies, structured by caste and class. Drawing on 25 cumulative months of fieldwork on energy infrastructures in the neighbouring regions of Pakistan (Sindh) and India (Gujarat and Rajasthan), we investigate how territorialisation and nationalism align to legitimise the dispossession of rural communities beyond the typical colonial-modernist promises of infrastructural development. By examining the extractive assemblage of domestic and foreign capital, militarised states, and powerful land brokers at the edge of the state, we articulate how the capital-state-powerbroker assemblage is deployed to create new resource frontiers where boundaries of value, citizenship, and legality are undermined. We find that these new extractive frontiers are enmeshed with national security and discourses of belonging, loyalty, and infiltration as a means of legitimising infrastructural development. With this backdrop, we explore the potential for counter-majoritarian and anti-casteist transformative change through prefigurative practices.