Resource frontiers after empire: Land, rivers and fossil fuels in decolonizing Asia

In this special seminar organized by the Political Ecology Research Group at the International Institute of Social Studies, Dr Majed Akhter will reflect on how exploitation of natural resources has shaped nationalist development and state power in decolonizing Asia. 

His presentation is part of a larger book project looking at decolonization and resource-led economic development in the areas that are today Pakistan and Malaysia, from the 1940s to the present. Akhter will examine how mono-crop agriculture, dam building and fossil fuel development contributed to forms of authoritarian ethno-state power in both regions. 

Establishing a capitalist agrarian frontier in the Malayan peninsula and Punjab was part of a process of incorporating both regions into the British imperial system. It was also a process fraught with racialization, with effects that continue to shape Malaysian and Pakistani politics today. Dam construction in the internal peripheries of Malaysian and Pakistani territories are rife with questions of uneven development and indigenous geopolitics. The fossil fuel frontier in both countries, especially with respect to the exploration and production of natural gas, involved the construction of national infrastructures, institutional expertise, and entanglements with the global political economy of oil. 

This seminar will focus primarily on the agrarian frontier. The larger project develops a 'parallax' understanding of comparison - where the goal is to generate new insight and understanding by highlighting unexpected juxtapositions, vantage points, and connected histories. By asking how Malaysian territory, politics, and development looks like from Pakistan - and vice versa - the project aims to develop a transregional understanding of how decolonization could come to be a technocratic, racialized, and authoritarian process. More broadly, it explores connection between nation, nature, and capital through the prism of the resource frontier.