Tassadiq, F. (2022) Producing dispossessed and humanitarian subjects: land acquisition and compensation policies in Lahore, Pakistan. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 45 (2). pp. 240-256. ISSN 1081-6976
Abstract
This article examines land acquisition for the construction of a metro train line in Lahore, Pakistan, to argue that the role and temporality of bureaucratic documentary practices are key to enabling urban informality and associated regimes of substantive citizenship. I examine the changing role of bureaucratic documents along the axes of (a) state and citizens, as documents are transferred between various actors who attribute different meanings to them; and (b) time, as documents assume varying meanings across their life cycles. First, I argue that documents constitute the disaggregated state and facilitate inconsistent practices that produce urban informality by exempting such settlements from some regulations while subjecting them to others. Second, a study of the time effects of these contingent practices and associated documentation shows that while original settlers may manipulate the disparate institutions of the state to secure resources, tolerance of such settlements across generations prompts a reformulation of local conceptions of landownership. Contemporary residents, then, position themselves as propertied citizens in possession of ownership documents. In this case of land acquisition, such efforts secured limited recognition from the state: residents were cast as illegal encroachers but were eventually offered some compensation as humanitarian aid, thereby reproducing socioeconomic inequalities.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | bureaucratic documents; urban informality; state; temporality; citizenship |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 28 Nov 2022 14:59 |
Last Modified: | 26 Sep 2024 09:48 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/plar.12506 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:193817 |