Emergent Conversation 18

This interview is part of the series Remnants of Empire, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 18

?w=200″ alt=”” width=”698″ height=”464″ /> Khairpur Nathan Shah city covered with flood water in Sindh in Pakistan 2022. Photo by Ali Hyder Junejo. CC BY 2.0.

PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow Abdulla Majeed interviews Maira Hayat, Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Abdulla: In your (2020) article “Empire’s Accidents,” you exquisitely illustrate how accidents come to be a site for the effecting of multiple scales of sovereignty. From one end, the accident emerges as a site for what you refer to as imperial sovereignty, one that is constituted through its management of unpredictability. From another end, these “sovereign accidents” (Hayat 2020, 59) emerge as site to demand more sovereignty from the state, bemoaning in a way its absence and the rendering of certain sites and populations, such as the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas), as an excess. Here, two different articulations of sovereignty emerge that appear to be co-constitutive of another; a top-down kind of sovereign rule through the management of accidents, and a popular form of everyday sovereignty articulated by ordinary people as they demand more from the former; that is for the state to perform its sovereignty. This approach to sovereignty, as you tell us, is different from the Agambenian negative-exception. I am wondering if you can sketch to our readers the stakes involved in these different iterations of sovereignty, and what makes “sovereignty” such an efficacious framework to understand this entanglement between accidents, law-making, and empire-building that appears in your work in Pakistan?

Maira: Sovereignty isn’t just a concept that you can intellectualize away. There are real life and death consequences. And so a persistent question remains: what is this writing in support of? And against? Maybe a little stepping back is warranted to roughly chart the itinerary of my engagement with sovereignty. My college years in Pakistan were the final years of General Musharraf’s military rule. In my last year of college I remember as student demonstrations were organized on campus a core concern I heard all the time around me was: “We have to make sure they listen, the CNNs and BBCs.” My coming of age in Pakistan, my educational background, that I read the newspaper daily since I was very young, and eagerly at that, meant I subscribed to some facts: the U.S. interferes, has a long history of interference; Pakistan and the U.S. have an old complex relationship—SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and CENTO (Central Treaty Organization) were on every exam I can think of, I am not joking, and I don’t know how many school children in the U.S. know what these were; coups don’t just happen in some countries, there are reasons of geopolitics and history and international political economy that explain them.

I came to the U.S. for the first time in 2010, as a PhD student, and suddenly found myself in conversations where U.S. interference elsewhere wasn’t obvious to everyone. One of the first graduate student conferences I went to, I presented an early draft of my paper (the “Empires Accidents” article). And I was shocked when an anthropologist—an expert on South Asian politics – said sovereignty isn’t helpful any more. We need newer concepts. And I’ve been thinking since: who decides or says we need new ones? Who says something is boring suddenly? To whom is it boring? It is 2011, I’m in a country that literally feels like a living, breathing, pulsating empire and here is a senior academic not finding sovereignty intellectually exciting. It was a real eye-opener. And insight into the stakes of intellectual labor for some of us. Into the differential, unrelatable, incommensurable stakes of intellectual labor. In 2018, just three years ago, the tribal areas were “merged” with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Sovereignty and its entailments, the spectacular and horrifying manifestations or the seemingly mundane administrative and jurisdictional questions, are far from settled.

There’s a passage in Partha Chatterjee’s (2004) The Politics of the Governed, a book I have turned to multiple times. “There is much in our present situation, therefore, to make us feel outraged, angry and agitated. Nevertheless, I accept that we, as professional social scientists and analysts, have a responsibility to continue the debates over secularism within the accepted forms of scientific discourse. To do this, I have chosen to move away from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Gujarat to the relatively calmer regions of eastern India. My intuition is that by focusing on a place like West Bengal, ruled for the last twenty-five years by a communist-led Left Front government, we might be able to talk usefully about the conditions for a democratic politics of secularism. I want to concentrate in particular on ways of handling what I think are the contradictions within the politics of secularism in India” (115). Where are we thinking from, are some places bad to think some things with, who decides and how? What are we thinking about, theorizing about, and what is always only a foil to that? As I wrote the article I was trying to make sense of all this.

Abdulla: What stood out to me about your work on the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) in Pakistan and their entanglement with the War on Terror, is that these lethal accidents do not always emerge as unintended, literally accidental, consequences or practices, but rather they seem to be orchestrated “accidents,” if not somewhat anticipated, and thus require different tactics of management. I am wondering to what extent can we think of this management and sorting as one of empire’s tactics of governance? If from one end certain populations are categorized around particular hierarchies of (in)civility, and by extension humanity, then from another end the sorting of different categories/possibilities of livelihood and deathhood is another mechanism of organization and categorization. I am especially thinking of the different categories through which these events come to be invoked and make sense: accidents, errors, collateral, misfortune.

Maira: Soon after 9/11 book stores in the country flooded with copies of books like Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans. Caroe was the British Governor of the NWFP (now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province) in 1947. The status of and stereotypes about the tribal areas—again, these aren’t tired things, they came back with such force for those of us who may not have been bothered all the time/already. Such habits of viewing, (mis)understanding, relating to (and their long provenance), made the brutalization of the area possible—in U.S. drone strikes, in military operations by the Pakistani military.

I think your question is such an important one – what are the categories, the sorting supports if you will that let people or/and states do this sorting and say, “Oh, ok those are mostly devalued lives and it’s ok to kill, sad, but ok.” Remembering how these practices are historically rooted doesn’t preclude us from recognizing how the categories change—their names, their boundaries, relations among them. And I bring up the change bit because it seems very important to me to not reduce all this politics to “the British colonial state did so and so.” Since 1947 there have been years of legal, political, constitutional change vis-à-vis the area. Nothing froze in time. And it was these all too common views of FATA—frozen, unchanging, lagging—that the section on case law was intended to push against. This isn’t a lawless space, a vacuum—these are thoroughly litigated spaces and politics. And also that history and politics has happened after the end of colonial rule. All too often accounts will go back to a British colonial past and then zoom into the present—and the connecting threads and work needed seems to be missing. What happened these past several decades? How has politics in Pakistan these past few decades been consequential? The legal reasoning at play in those cases is very interesting, it gives you insights into not just the intricacies of center-province politics, political party-military struggles, but also a sense of how the global was always factored into seemingly local politics and legal reasoning. And vice versa. In that you can’t tell a story of U.S. empire without considering, for example, the role of FATA. The U.S. as a site is not sufficient—the story is incomplete. In part, what I’m thinking about here is the scholarship on U.S. case law—as if all the legal conversations that had to happen after 9/11 happened in U.S. courts. Of course this is not to naively suggest that a judgment from a Pakistani court does the same work in the world as a U.S. judgment. But if we restrict ourselves to academic scholarship for the moment, a narrow focus on the intricacies of legal process and reasoning in the U.S. can have the effect of shutting out/disappearing the conversation going on elsewhere. And this reinforces the divide: “those” far-away places are where the brutality happens, this here is where the intricate calm legal conversations happen.

Consider one of the court decisions, Samander vs. Crown (1954), that I discuss in my article. Samander was decided in 1954, before Pakistan’s first constitution of 1956 and thus in the absence of “fundamental rights” protections. What was the problem here? The bar on jurisdiction in Section 60 of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) and the office (colonial-era provenance) of the Deputy Commissioner. Decisions of the nature prescribed by the FCR, Justice Cornelius said, were “obnoxious to all recognized modern principles governing the dispensation of justice” and were not proceedings in justice but “proceedings before administrative agency.” His critique of the FCR—which is what subsequent cases have cited—led him to conclude that decisions under the FCR’s provisions were not of an appealable nature. Calling the FCR’s guiding principle one of “public policy” he ruled that the court was not competent to enter that arena. Ultimately, he took the “obnoxious” nature of the FCR to mean that the courts could not intervene. At play here is how boundaries and limits to jurisdiction are asserted, disputed, and reasoned for and against; how categories are shored up, categories such as the frontier, Pathans, the colonial and the constitutional and postcolonial, war-like. And this is a developing conversation: Khan Abdul Akbar Khan v. The Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar (1957) deliberated over reasonable and racial classifications with reference to “Pathans and Balochis.” And this time the constitution was in place, further complicating the play of jurisdiction, and historical continuities and/or obstructions to those continuities.

Abdulla: Pakistan seems to be entangled with imperial statecraft in interesting ways. First, not only does it emerge from the past encounter with the British Raj whose traces continue to be felt until this day, and the more recent encounter with US imperial statecraft, but also rising Indian, Chinese, and Saudi influence that troubles our conventional understandings of imperiality. I am wondering to what extent do these different encounters reshape how we can understand imperialism from the vantage point of the Pakistani context?

Maira: Pakistan’s political history and present constitute a challenging location from which to try to understand this. It’s not a simple bully and bullied dynamic of course—it is more helpful to recognize how inequality governs international power relations, is inscribed into them, and how it plays out. Who is funding what, where, and why? Who is indebted to whom? What for? How long has it been? What are the terms of repayment? The long history of U.S.–Pakistan relations, how that has determined Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan, India, China, Iran and Russia, for example; how Pakistan has perceived regional insecurity and threat as well as benefit and profit (and I mean this not just financially but also in terms of what states and militaries are thinking about) and thus been led to this or that patron. And I think it gets interesting here because we reach in one sense the limits of how “states” see and plan and think. We need to sort states further, they aren’t all the same—patrons, for example, what are their perceptions of threat and advantage? What are military designs? The military and state don’t match up perfectly—so what about those frictions and how do they enable some imperial designs to take hold and frustrate others? I love real-world examples—they concretize claims and assertions. So here are two, an old one and a new one:

Soon after 1947, when the country is created and British colonial rule formally ends, the archives have really interesting stories to tell about how U.K. authorities get upset with Pakistan because it is giving most of the contracts for infrastructure building for the dams (as part of the Indus Water Treaty) to U.S. corporations and the U.K. really wanted those contracts!

Consider a more recent example: this recent news article in DAWN, on Pakistan seeking a waiver to trade with Iran. What is a waiver for trade, why is it needed, who needs it? You can’t understand all this without understanding U.S. sanctions on Iran and how that affects not just one country and its people but the entire geopolitical arrangement.

Abdulla: Following from this earlier question, the most recent devasting floods in Pakistan that happened earlier in October 2022, and the international response to them, brought to the surface debates around climate imperialism that interlinked not only governmental institutions, but also transnational corporations and foreign aid in ways that uncover the ever-expanding tentacles of imperiality beyond the nation-state, while simultaneously reproducing the state’s centrality and legitimacy. I am wondering how do these themes appear in your most recent work with irrigation infrastructures, dams for example (Hayat 2022), in ways that recognize the continuity of the entanglement with imperial statecraft, rather than approaching it as a rupture in time, or a by-gone past or legacy? How do these “refusals of relationality,” to use your framing elsewhere (Hayat 2020, 54), come to be (de)mystified in your work?

Maira: What I wanted was for this piece to serve as a reminder that this infrastructure was built with foreign funding, it was jointly produced (negotiated, designed, created). And it continues to be updated, repaired, maintained because of Pakistan’s entanglement within these circuits of capital (development aid etc.). A lot of discussion has focused on the moral case for climate reparations. I think that’s really important work. But there’s another way to assert the demands of a politics of accountability—if an entire infrastructure and geography is co-constructed, jointly made and financed, then how can it suddenly become one country’s failure, an example of one country’s bad governance? These geographies are a result of human fashioning—that “human” is conjunctural, and so it implicates geopolitical moments such as the Cold war. There is a tendency in U.S. academia, and conversations more generally here, for countries “like” Pakistan to be considered as always far, distant, exceptional, odd. It’s this ignorance that I continue to be struck by, even after almost thirteen years here. I’m often unsure how to make sense of it: is it lack of knowledge or mostly lack of interest? Whichever it is, it is not innocent.

I also think the questions of how the colonial and postcolonial are related would benefit so much from, as you say, demystification. I’m interested in concretizations of that relationship, they are easier to understand in my opinion than “haunting,” and yet more challenging to trace, to examine and argue for. The office of the Deputy Commissioner, for example, or legislation such as the Frontier Crimes Regulation or a dam such as the Tarbela or Mangla—these knot the colonial and postcolonial in myriad ways. And these aren’t accidental knots. So why the FCR continues to be in place for decades after the end of colonial rule is only partially explained by hauntings and residuals and traces—it needs to be explained in terms of deliberate postcolonial political calculi involving, for instance, Pakistan’s security imaginaries, ethnic and geographic discrimination against Pashtun, and national party politics.

If we turn now to water infrastructure: If you look at just one part of Pakistan’s vast and intricately connected water infrastructure, the Mangla dam, who built it? Who all built it? A San Francisco company, Guy F. Atkinson Construction, put together a team with Chicago Bridge and Iron Company, S. J. Groves and Sons Company, Charles L. Harney, C. J. Langenfelder and Sons, Ostrander Construction Company, R. A. Tripper and Walsh Construction company, and won the Mangla dam contract.

By multiple measures (considering rock or earth-fill structures, height, reservoir capacity etc.) the Tarbela dam is the world’s largest. One of the things with such storage reservoirs is they start to silt as soon as they begin to be operated. For many years now one of my clearest memories from new dailies is reading about the Tarbela dam about to “die.” And every few years there’s a new project: for example, the current World Bank Fourth Extension Hydropower Project to prolong its life. In fact, another dam is being built north of Tarbela and part of the reason is to extend the life of Tarbela further. So there’s the politics of finance and development but also at play is the life of the structure—a function of soil types, gradients, sediment type and flow etc.—and what it necessitates. But even the larger and more general politics behind the construction of such infrastructure is not singular—this is what I tried working through in the Political Geography piece where I say that the dam is about storing water, and making electricity and all that, but it’s also a bordering practice. The border with India, the border from India. The act of partition—the year 1947 and the end of formal British colonial rule inaugurates it—is an ongoing one.

Abdulla: I’d like to close this interview on two aspects that appear to be interconnected to me. One is your provocation, by way of Nasser Hussain, on how to sustain life under the postcolony. You end your article by calling for a sense of resilience in building a repertoire or an archive of livelihood, while simultaneously emphasizing that such a repertoire entails a political duty to unveil and uncover the “imperial ecologies that shore up or frustrate such attempts, and how, when, and why” (Hayat 2020, 72), as a way to claim one’s sovereignty and subjecthood in the present. The second aspect appeared in a piece you’ve written for the Washington Post on the 2021 floods in Pakistan, in which you call for expanding the temporal and geographical scale of global responsibility for the ensuing ecological crisis in Pakistan. This then leads you to suggest that under the present conditions of sovereign debt, climate reparations are not only necessary, but also a duty or obligation, that the Global North owes to those most affected by these climate crises. It appears to me that such demands for reparative justice are part of the political commitment to demystify how the aforementioned “imperial ecologies” operate. Do you see this call for reparations as one of the conditions of possibility animating the sustainability of life under the present crisis?

Maira: When I have had the reparations conversation with some friends and colleagues the overwhelming tenor of the conversation tends towards: let’s be real. There are very good reasons for it: from racism to indifference to “donor fatigue.” But language is very powerful as an instrument of change. What if, however slowly, the language begins to change from help and aid and grants to repair and repayment? It reflects a change in viewing geopolitical relationality. It can slowly build acceptability. More people might begin to recognize that different people, groups, networks, movements have to take responsibility for not just “themselves.” Where are you drawing the borders of concern and care and advocacy? What’s the basis? Is it grounded in ignorance of history or in bad history? Or is it grounded in active disavowal of responsibility: “Yah, our countries did terrible things in the past but we aren’t to blame.” Even if the latter, it doesn’t mean the pushing, pressing, urging, disagreeing, and calling out should stop. Here, it should also be stressed that an important part of the story of infrastructure and repair is money. For debt-ridden countries, what sort of commitment to climate adaptation in terms of re/building can we realistically expect?

Of course we cannot flatten postcolonies into the postcolony. Having said that, I would also add that it merits reflection which postcolonies or postcolonial experiences have come to stand in for “the postcolonial?” One thing the Pakistan case shows us very well is how there are multiple sovereignties that have to be contended with. Postcolonial politics then is about imperial histories, projects, and relations new and old. But it is also about the politics of disrupting those projects. As well, what politics takes shape in this interface? What do people do to live, what do people live by, crafting repertoires of living, turning to or away from, and sidestepping, organizing with or against? We should also be clear that the stakes are life and death and devastation for some. People were bombed, homes were destroyed, loved ones are dead—theorizing sovereignty and empire without keeping that front and center isn’t meaningful or responsible.

?w=191″ alt=”” width=”191″ height=”200″ />Maira Hayat is an Assistant Professor at Notre Dame’s Keough School for Global Affairs, and concurrent faculty at the Department of Anthropology. In 2022 she was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Hayat conducts research at the intersection of bureaucracy, environment and law, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods. Her current book project, Duties of Water: Bureaucratic Labor and the Postcolonial Promise, builds on her doctoral dissertation which won the 2019 S. S. Pirzada Annual Dissertation Prize.

?w=191″ alt=”” width=”191″ height=”200″ />Abdulla Majeed is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His work lays at the intersections of everyday statecraft, exile, citizenship, and temporality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqi migrants in Jordan, his dissertation examines how the Iraqi exilic experience comes to be entangled with multiple statecrafts that (dis)order ordinary citizen-migrants aspirations for and constructions of political imaginaries for the future that transcend, or coexist along, traditional forms of governance and ethical citizenship. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Abdulla is curating the series Remnants of Empire that reflects on the everyday relevance of empire and imperialism not only as an object of study, but also as a method for knowledge about futurity, citizenship, and sovereignty.