Development-imposed harms, differentiated citizenship, and access to redress: Towards a comparative account

In the Global South, development programs are usually presented as interventions that improve peoples’ lives, notably by providing infrastructure and generating jobs. Yet all too often such programs also cause harm to particular social groups who may be displaced from their land, robbed of water and other resources, or affected by pollution. While the harms are consistent, people in different corners of the Global South have different approaches to seeking redress, and radically different capacities to achieve any sort of justice. In many contexts, distinctions established in the colonial era continue to expose nominally-equal citizens to uncompensated harms. Drawing on collaborative research with colleagues at UMR-SENS, this talk sets out a framework for examining these differences. Why are recourse to law and the courts, or mass mobilizations, or media campaigns so prominent in some countries and virtually absent in others?

TANIA MURRAY LI is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her publications include Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University Press, 2014), Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia (with Derek Hall and Philip Hirsch, NUS Press, 2011), The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Duke University Press, 2007) and many articles on land, labour, class, capitalism, development, resources and indigeneity with a particular focus on Indonesia. Her latest book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation of Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone (Duke University Press, 2021) is co-authored with Pujo Semedi (Universitas Gadjah Mada).