Jamal Ali Bashir
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Petra Dobner
Title:Examining the Everyday State and Political Society in “Tribal” Southeastern Baluchistan, Pakistan
Bio:
I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2014 and commended my MA in Democratic Governance and Civil Society funded by DAAD PPGG program at the University of Osnabrück in 2015. I finished my MA in 2017 and began working as a Project Assistant in March 2018 at Re: work research center in collaboration with the Humboldt University Berlin. I joined the Graduate School "Society and Culture in Motion" and the Politics Department of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg as a Ph.D. Candidate in October 2018.
Abstract:
My research will trace the concurrent processes of state formation and the expansion of irrigation in the mid-nineteenth century in Upper Sindh along the border of Baluchistan. Superimposition of colonial state structure, through mechanisms of water control, on a society organized along tribal lines, essentially gave birth to a new kind of power structure with distinctive social relations and new forms of resource distribution. With the birth of Pakistan, and the expansion of the post-colonial state in this area, manifested in the form of new canal construction projects, state-society relationships and interactions went through another shift. Such a historical context of state-society relations is pertinent to understand the existing claim-making processes, negotiations, and exchanges in “political society.” “Seeing like the state” (Scott 1998) and “seeing the state” (Corbridge et al. 2005) will serve as two important analytical tools to apprehend how the “everyday state” attempts to make sense of the claims made by the people, and how the people justify such claims. Such an analysis will necessarily challenge culturalist, totalizing and essentialist conceptions of “western” or “eastern” forms of state.
Publications:
Conference Report
“Servants’ Pasts.” 2nd International Conference held in Berlin (11.04.2018–13.04.2018). Available on the H-Soz-Kult website: https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7914?title=servants-pasts-2nd-international-conference&recno=16&q=&sort=&fq=&total=7668