How are the limits of state power imagined and acted upon in a place where the state supposedly does not exist? This dissertation explores the kinds of political formations that emerge at the real-and-imagined limits, or frontiers, of the state in a region of northwest Colombia called Urabá. For the last 50 years, Urabá has been one of the most violent hotspots of the country’s civil war. Both locals and outside observers almost unanimously explain the region’s violent history and its unruly contemporary condition by pointing to “la ausencia del estado,” the absence of the state. But, as an even cursory review of its history shows, Urabá has in fact been a persistent site of state-building projects, raising a second question: How did this region become understood as stateless in the first place?

In short, this dissertation is about how “statelessness” became and remains a powerful ideological and material force in Urabá, beginning in the early 1900s and into the contemporary moment. It follows the accumulated weight of violent contradictions arising from recursive waves of statecraft in Urabá: from the United Fruit Company, to insurgent guerrilla groups; from paramilitaries, to technocratic planners. My aim, in other words, is to understand “the absence of the state” historically and ethnographically, not to debunk it as a bizarre case of collective false consciousness. Indeed, rather than analyzing the region as a case of state absence or failure, I argue that Urabá’s violent political-economic conflicts have produced surprisingly resilient, though by no means benevolent, regimes of accumulation and rule.

This dissertation explores transformations in the geographic imaginary of American empire as it reached up into the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans, from the purchase of Alaska in 1867 through the middle period of the Cold War. In a series of three long-form essays, I argue that the waters around the Aleutian and Pribilof islands— commonly called Unangam Tanangin by Native Unangax̂ before Russian (c.1740-1867) and U.S. (1867-) colonial occupations— incubated a uniquely transoceanic formation of U.S. imperialism that set the stage for later global designs. Strung across almost 2,000 miles of ocean between the Alaska and Kamchatka peninsulas, the Aleutian chain comprises more than 300 volcanic islands at the subductive interface between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Volcanic activity and ocean circulation between waters of the deep Aleutian Trench and much shallower Bering make it a zone of extraordinary biophysical productivity and geophysical dynamism. These qualities made the Aleutians a rich environment for Unangax̂ forms of life; so too for i) geoeconomic, ii) geopolitical, and iii) geophysical and technoscientific modes of imperial speculation. First, for late-19th and early-20th century U.S. expansionists, the Aleutians were a two-way axis of control linking speculative transpacific markets with the prospects of Arctic resources and transpolar passage. Second, the power to police—if not entirely claim sovereignty over—that axis became a geopolitical imperative involving the complex racialization of Unangax̂ laborers and, later, Japanese adversaries in an imagined global race war. Third, the equally tempestuous oceanic and volcanic milieu fomented theoretical work by early hydrographers and nuclear scientists alike on the entangled nature of geographic relations and the powers of the earth itself—both of which would become the improbable objects of imperial desire. In each case, these transoceanic imaginaries of American empire envisioned the Aleutians as both lock and key to increasingly global—even planetary—futures. Drawing on a variety of archival materials and approaches from critical scholarship in geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and environmental history, I trace these themes through what I call the “geographic techniques” of U.S. imperialism. Toward that end, I follow the drawing of three different kinds of lines— the hydrographic surveyor’s line, the global color line, and the waveform of a nuclear detonation, respectively–– as they index the tenuous compositions of technics, bodies, and milieu conscripted (and refused) to make the transoceanic formations of American empire.

This dissertation engages a central paradox concerning spatial transformation in Mumbai today. It asks how elite-biased, global-city redevelopment interventions entailing the mass displacement of the urban poor are made politically feasible in an ostensibly democratic city with strong working-class movements. In unraveling this paradox, it offers a perspective that diverges from recent scholarly debates on social movements in Indian cities and neoliberal urban governance. The urban social movements literature has focused on the agency of the poor, seeing new slum mobilizations as a burgeoning form of substantive democracy through which the poor access their needs. Neoliberal governance debates position states and logics of rule as the primary agents facilitating transnational capital accumulation through new spatial practices in cities and regions. Instead, this research on the politics of slum eviction shows how differentiated social mobilizations are deeply intertwined with and constitutive of a changing state and its redevelopmental interventions.

Through a comparative ethnography of the politics of eviction, this dissertation makes two interconnected arguments. First, it shows how the structure and operation of the state has shifted to politically facilitate large-scale projects and en masse slum removal. In such new configurations, the urban poor no longer have the ability to leverage their votes in exchange for governmental compensation. Instead, bureaucracies have centralized control of redevelopment processes while unevenly distributing displacement compensation, via market mechanisms, through NGOs, social movements and other non-state actors.

Second, it demonstrates how changing meanings and historically sedimented practices of social mobilization around eviction in Mumbai are central to these transformations in redevelopmental governance. It draws on a Gramscian conceptualization of the state and hegemony to understand how redevelopment is advanced, thwarted and negotiated. Hegemony, as Gramsci understood it, is a historically specific set of processes through which the interests of dominant classes are secured. The hegemonic state is a site of social struggle within and beyond its formal structures operating in and through a variety of interconnected institutions, civil society groups and social relations. As the apparatus of the redevelopment interests of elite classes in Mumbai, state hegemony has operated through a mix of force, negotiation and consent in multiple arenas through which evicted slum residents, NGOs, movements and other representative agents have become significant political actors. Redevelopmental hegemony also operates in the realm of meanings and cultural formations, what Gramsci called ethico-political struggles. This ethico-political dimension is immensely important in Mumbai's redevelopment and eviction processes. Because of a history of development in which class struggles over urban land and housing have articulated with gender and with Hindu-nationalist and regionalist identity politics, eviction has engendered differentiated experiences and politics. Furthermore, non-state intermediaries shape collective subjectivities by drawing on histories of struggle as well as globally circulating development and rights-based discourses. Accordingly, evicted slum dwellers have occupied highly contradictory positions--challenging, enabling and reworking redevelopment interventions through their aspirations and ethico-political claims to space.

The dissertation explores three political trajectories of eviction in ethnographic relational comparison--a method grounded in the idea that differentiated political practices and interconnections are crucial for understanding power-laden spatial processes like redevelopment and displacement. In all three cases, the experience and politics of eviction operated along three axes of difference: class, gender and ethno-religious identity. In the first case, gendered participation and NGO-mediation helped to suture cooperation with market-based resettlement for a World Bank-funded transport infrastructure project. In the second case, slum residents evicted for road construction under the same transport project contested forced displacement with the assistance of a lawyer in a transnational forum citing infractions of World Bank resettlement norms and loss of income. In the third case, evicted slum residents--many having marginalized ethno-religious identities--aligned with a social movement highly critical of neoliberal development and resisted state violence and uncompensated displacement as citizens excluded from the city and nation.

Through this comparative exploration of struggles over meaning and space, this study shows that difference--in the socio-spatial experience and in the practices of representation and mediation of eviction--serves to rework state power and its capacity to advance the cultural politics of belonging and the political economy of global-city redevelopment.

Land has been essential to American military power in Korea from 1945 into the present day. The dissertation charts the evolution of American “land power” in South Korea, focusing on the transition from direct military dispossessions during the Korean War to a US military real estate system that became increasingly enmeshed in South Korea’s land development system in the post-war decades. Today, American land power in South Korea consists not only of the US military’s ability to project force from a point in space, but also of land valued as a commodity in a way that serves the ongoing US military presence in the country. In the early 2000s, military lands accumulated during the Korean War through mass civilian dispossession began to function as assets in the US-South Korea burden-sharing system. Even with a reduction of the total number of US bases in South Korea, alliance burdens have been increasingly shifted onto South Korea and onto localities. The South Korean state has treated most released US military lands as an asset used to fund the US-South Korea alliance, essentially forcing local communities to either repurchase their own lands back from the state, or to lure investors and developers to do so by passing deregulatory measures. Further, political devolution and neoliberalization created conditions in which the politics of (de)militarization were almost entirely subsumed by a new pro-growth and pro-deregulation politics of development in many places. The dissertation argues in favor of a multi-scalar anti-dispossession critique of US militarism that considers (de)militarization as a process that extends beyond the walls of any military base and into a landscape of uneven local development.

Brazil-China agricultural trade mushroomed since 2000 to become one of the world’s largest flows of agroindustrial commodities and capital, reigniting and transforming agrarian questions in a new, multipolar world order. After the conjunction of food price and financial crises in 2007-2009, this burgeoning trade gave rise to a very palpable boom of Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness. My dissertation is the most in-depth and extensive study to date about this phenomenon, and its background in historical relations between Brazil and China. As this growth of Chinese investments abroad took place, a broader rush of investments in farmland and agroindustrial production, processing, trade, and infrastructure unfolded worldwide (often called the global land grab) – and China was identified as a major new investor, while Brazil was recognized as one of the foremost targets for transnational agroindustrial investments. State and corporate actors across both China and Brazil promoted this leveraging of investments as a new form of South-South cooperation, claiming it strengthens domestic agribusinesses and governments in these countries in relation to the hegemonic agribusiness and state interests from the Global North. On the other hand, some critics feared this new wave of investments establishes a neocolonial relation that deindustrializes Brazil, dragging it back to an extractivist and export-oriented agriculture that curtails employment and the standard of living of Brazilians, and locks the country economically into dependent international relations. In this dissertation, I set out to investigate where and how Chinese investments are taking place in Brazilian agribusiness (both direct and indirect, targeting everything from seeds, agrochemicals, and other inputs, farmland and agricultural production, agroindustrial processing, and the related logistics infrastructure such as warehouses and ports). My findings indicate that Chinese investments in Brazilian agribusiness did expand rapidly in recent years, but they are still far dwarfed by capital from the Global North – particularly in farmland and agricultural production. The prominent discourse that “China is a (or the) major land grabber” is debunked, and I argue it has actually been constructed through a complex conjuncture of social interests that range across rural social movements, commercial farmers, landed elites, and industrialists in Brazil, alongside agribusinesses and financiers from the Global North. This indicates also a form of sinophobia, which I argue must be understood in its 200-year history of shifting and sedimented Orientalist discourses about the Chinese in Brazilian (and other “Western”) imaginaries. Tracing a genealogy of this sinophobia, I also reconstruct the emergence of a transnational class of boosters, brokers, bureaucrats, and (agri)businessmen (mostly men), who I call collectively “agribusiness professionals.” I argue these agribusiness professionals have not only been at the forefront of constructing Brazil-China relations for over 200 years, but also it is examining their work of assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian land, labor, and expertise that we can comprehend the nature and denouement of Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships. Thus, I combine political economic and historical methods with a critical global ethnography of the transnational agribusiness professionals assembling Chinese capital with Brazilian agribusiness – rooted in in-depth interviews, life histories, and some participant observation undertaken from the fall of 2010 through the spring of 2017. This period included fieldwork in China during the summers of 2011 and 2013, and the spring of 2015. In Brazil, fieldwork was undertaken during the summer of 2012, and between January 2014 and August 2015. In total, I spent over 20 non-consecutive months undertaking fieldwork in Brazil and 7 non-consecutive months in China, working in about 14 Brazilian states and 8 Chinese provinces (and provincial-level cities). This research reveals that Chinese agroindustrial capital is not homogeneous, centralized, or directed “from Beijing”, and rather than treating it as a “global force” that has “local impacts” in Brazil, I reveal how Chinese and Brazilian agribusiness professionals co-produce the emerging Brazil-China agroindustrial assemblage in the pursuit of their own affluence and influence. On one end of the spectrum, there are companies and projects that I term “Paper Tigers.” These are companies that invested (or attempted to invest) primarily in farmland and agricultural production, and so were feared to be menacing land grabbers, but nevertheless turned out to be quite ineffective. Through a combination of insufficient financial and political resources, inadequate operational capacity among agribusiness professionals, and social resistance across various scales, these Paper Tigers either failed to operate profitably or even establish themselves in the first place. On the other end of the spectrum are companies I call (adapting a term from the Chinese government’s recent policies) “Dragon Heads.” These are companies that play leading roles in their sectors domestically, and launched foreign investments primarily through global-level mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of existing transnational or local (i.e. Brazilian) companies, focusing primarily on agroindustrial trade. While these indirect investments through M&As actually amount to the largest influx of Chinese agroindustrial capital into Brazil, and show clear signs and potential for converging with the agribusiness corporations from the Global North that had hegemony over much of Brazilian and transnational agroindustrial assemblages, this is still an underexplored phenomenon. A central contribution of my dissertation is discerning Chinese agribusiness investments in Brazil as Dragon Heads or Paper Tigers, showing this to be a much more useful lens for analysis than simple categorization across ownership structure as private companies or state-owned enterprises. My main argument is that, whether Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships collapse as Paper Tigers or advance as Dragon Heads, these projects ultimately benefit the transnational agribusiness professionals who assemble them above all others. While transnational agribusiness professionals cultivate their own wealth and power through these projects, they also aggravate the exploitation of natural resources and workers, and the marginalization of peasants and agroecological alternatives. Therefore, what I call the “South-South question” – how Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships constitute new linkages of agroindustrial capitalism within and between these previously-peripheral spaces that emerge now as new hubs of capital, and with what implications for the society and environment, particularly struggles for democracy and social justice – brings into the spotlight this group of agribusiness professionals as the key intellectuals (in the sense that Gramsci used in his examination of the “southern question”) who construct capitalist hegemony through transnational agribusiness development. In turn, the struggle for democracy, land redistribution, agroecology, agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social justice must contest this intellectual and political terrain of transnational agribusiness professionals. Agroecological alternatives for Brazil-China agroindustrial partnerships exist, and are illustrated in the conclusion of this dissertation, but their pursuit is fundamentally a project of internationalist class struggle – uniting peasants, workers, and their allies in both China and Brazil against an increasingly transnational capitalist class.

Rare earth elements are not rare at all. They are essential for the hardware of contemporary life as we know it, every contemporary industrialized society depends on them, and there are no known alternatives. Yet the geography of their production is strange. In 2009, China accounted for 97% percent of global production, with the majority coming from the Bayan Obo mine operated by the state-owned enterprise Baotou Rare Earth Group on the southern Mongolian steppe. When gradually intensifying export quotas combined with a temporary halt of official exports in 2010, the rest of the world woke up to its near total dependence on China’s rare earth monopoly. To address this crisis, a Brazilian firm (Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração) determined to capture rare earths from its niobium mine tailings in the state of Minas Gerais. Betting on the willingness of downstream firms to pay a premium for non-Chinese rare earths and subsidizing the effort with revenues from their niobium sales, they resolved to produce a steady output of rare earth oxides regardless of global market fluctuations. In 2012, CBMM successfully produced high-purity rare earth oxides. In 2013, the US, EU, and Japan won a WTO case against China’s rare earth export quotas, restoring some semblance of the global status quo. But the story does not end there.

Despite the relative ubiquity of rare earth elements, the abundance of known reserves near existing infrastructure networks, and the dissolution of the 2010 crisis, global prospecting efforts—with the aid of national governments and militaries—have targeted São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the high Amazon and the Western Lunar Highlands on the Moon as the next major points on the global rare earth frontier. This dissertation addresses the question: Given that rare earth elements are both abundant and vital, why is their production driven to so few, seemingly remote places? This question immediately begets three others: through what processes did China’s Bayan Obo mine emerge as the single greatest source of rare earth elements worldwide? What provoked changes in China’s policy and practice, and how did this precipitate spatial transformations elsewhere? And for what purposes are state, military, and private actors pursuing rare earth mining in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the Moon?

This dissertation proposes that the strange geography of the global rare earth frontier can be explained by world-historical shifts in the global division of toxic labor occurring within a context of state-building and geopolitical contest. It thus advances three claims. First, China’s monopoly emerged through a convergence of long-term historical processes shaping northern China in the context of early 20th century imperialism, Cold War politics, and the epochal global economic shifts precipitated by Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms and the Reagan/Thatcher revolution. Second, the change in China’s political economic priorities from export dominance to conservation has been stimulated by the acute environmental and epidemiological harms generated by rare earth production coupled with China’s changing position in the global division of labor. Third, the contemporary geography of the global rare earth frontier is driven by more than geological determinism: although these sites are rich in rare earth elements, they are also historically contested regions and focal points for territorial agendas, for which a nationalist mandate for rare earth extraction provides a convenient pretext.

These claims are based in a world-historical analysis of rare earth mining, and draw on political economy, political ecology, transnational theory to examine the convergence of Baotou, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, and the Moon in the production of the global rare earth frontier from the late 19th to early 21st century. I engage scientific literatures, archives, expert interviews and other perspectives across the Anglophone, Sinophone, and Lusophone world which were gathered in China, Brazil, and the United States during 2010 – 2014. The multilingual approach is central to this project. Multiple forms of knowledge are evident in the discourses on the rare earth frontier, and there is a symmetrical inaccessibility to the working rationales across language barriers even as these rationales interpenetrate to shape thought and action across global space.

By examining the transnational historical production of the rare earth frontier across these sites, this dissertation refutes three dominant, yet persistent assumptions circulating in contemporary popular, policy, and academic discourse. First, that China’s rare earth monopoly emerged because it possesses more rare earth elements than any other country; second, that China and Brazil possess mutually unintelligible histories precluding grounded relational analyses, and; third, that the Moon is a space of exception, beyond the purview of global economic activities and likewise, therefore, of critical concern.

The purpose of this work is to demystify the contemporary global rare earth frontier. This work therefore has three aims. The first is to equip the reader with a deeper understanding of rare earth elements—the peculiarities of their geology and production, their political economic significance and their role in geopolitics far beyond what is available in the flurry of reports and opinion pieces generated since 2009. The second is to interrogate the historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the recent ‘crisis’ not as an exceptional circumstance, but as an episode that can be understood as emerging from and indicative of global development politics. The third and broadest aim is to move beyond entrenched global imaginaries that insist on the mutual unintelligibility of ‘China’ and ‘the West,’ or which seek to explain global changes as a series of unidirectional ‘impacts’ of one place on another, of ‘center’ on ‘periphery,’ (Hart 2002) as exemplified by much recent (but important) work concerned with China and Latin America (Gallagher 2008, García-Herrero 2007, Jenkins 2008, Rodriguez 2006).

Although these sites differ in many important ways, each demonstrates a particular set of frontier attributes drawing especially from their respective histories at the margins of major imperial and territorial powers. These similarities help explain their convergence as points of extraction along the contemporary global rare earth frontier, while their differences account for the temporal and technological relationalities among these three sites in the global division of toxic labor.

This work challenges the widely held controversial “greed and grievance” (resource curse) narrative by drawing critical insights about conflicts in the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta region of Nigeria has attracted substantial scholarly attention in view of the paradox of poverty and violence amidst abundant natural resources. This discourse suggests that persistent resource-induced conflicts in the region derive from either greed or grievance. Instead, the present work draws inspiration from the political geography of the Niger Delta, and puts the physical area at the center of its analysis. The understanding that the past and present history of a people is etched in their socio-political geography inspires this focus.

Whereas existing literatures engages with the Niger Delta as a monolithic domain, my study takes a more nuanced approach, which recognizes a multiplicity of layers mostly defined by socio-geographical peculiarities of different parts of the region and specificity of conflicts its people experience. In specific terms, the study demarcates Rivers and Delta States in Niger Delta into two distinctive domains – Eastern and Western Niger Delta respectively. Although each domain has experienced violent conflicts of various dimensions and proportions, such conflicts are distinct and distinguishable in several respects: in terms of their genealogy, patterns, trajectories, actors, motivations and modalities. These important distinctions, in turn, define and determine the nature and responses to conflicts generated over the years. The two conflict domains of Rivers and Delta States are shaped, then, by local socio-political dynamics within the Niger Delta.

There are however, cross-delta linkages and common burdens connecting these domains such as: corporate imperialism, marginalization, dispossession, environmental degradation, repression, poverty, unemployment and the quest for social justice. These common denominators influenced Paul Collier and most social science scholars to categorize the Niger Delta holistically as a conflict zone. Unfortunately and significantly, however, all these scholars have ignored the fact that in countries such as Nigeria, there is not just one conflict (resource conflict); rather, there are several, and they cannot be easily placed under the blanket category “resource curse.”

This study thus, rethinks Collier and conventional social science narratives on the Niger Delta conflict with a view to understanding the complicated geo-political dynamics of the region. The work shows that conflicts in the Niger Delta are precipitated by age-long animosities arising from land disputes, territorial claims, chieftancy tussles and demand for political autonomy fueled in the contemporary moment by petro-capitalism (petro-relations) and blurred by the spoils of oil.

The methodology for the study is a comparative analysis of East versus West Niger Delta. It draws on primary and secondary data sources as well as making extensive use of archival materials in order to elicit the historical, geographical and contemporary dimensions of the conflicts.

The planet's changing climatology poses epistemological and practical problems for insurance institutions underwriting weather or property risks: models based on meticulously calculated empirical event frequencies will not project risk in a changing climate system. Seeking to explain the unprecedented scale of recent insured losses, media pieces regularly articulate a narrative that links climate change to an immanently insecure future. This logic has prompted some scholars to place climate change in a new category of risks generated by industrial society that are fundamentally incalculable and uninsurable. This dissertation challenges the epistemological assumptions and empirical validity of the "uninsurability hypothesis" using the case study of (re)insurance and catastrophe modeling for North Atlantic tropical cyclones. In so doing, it turns a critical eye on the depoliticized discourse of climate change emergency.

The research analyzes the development of insurance institutions and definitions of climate change risk over time, applying the theory that risks are reconstructed phenomenon of multiple contingency which always embody contested classificatory and causal stories. Research included over forty extended interviews with academic, regulatory, and private sector employees; observation at thirteen industry, academic, and regulatory conferences; and qualitative and quantitative analysis of corporate and regulatory documents and datasets. The findings trace new constellations of science, value, and fear that are emerging within the (re)insurance industry as it attempts to assess and manage climate risks and secure new paths to accumulation. Three major themes emerge.

First, the dynamics of climate change are being integrated into circuits of insurance and financial capital. The perception of climate risk may buoy the (re)industry's business prospects in the short term by reproducing uncertainty and allowing firms to exclude certain risks from all-perils coverage and repackage them into new products. Climate risks may be incorporated into the central contradictory dynamic of the catastrophe reinsurance market, which requires the continual recurrence of catastrophic losses and devaluation in order to sustain pricing and accumulation in the long term. Meanwhile, investment capital is accessing new risk premiums from the insurance sector through catastrophe bonds, the market for which demonstrates a strategic and selective attempt to capture "returns on place" by finance capital, rather than an "escape" from uninsurable places on the part of (re)insurers.

Second, within both the industry and scientific community, the question of how climate change is influencing catastrophic losses or will do so in the future is far from settled, despite its representation as a closed "matter of fact". Furthermore, most (re)insurers do not currently account for climate change in their daily underwriting and pricing, and often cite the possibility of compensating for climate effects through future annual adjustments to prices and policies. This apparent contradiction between discourse and practice is the result of a complex set of institutional, political, and economic factors rather than a systematic attempt to deceive the public or exaggerate risks.

Third, privatized economies of science - and particularly probabilistic catastrophe models - are central tools for climate risk management through (re)insurance markets. The expertise of PhD-credentialed scientists is increasingly used in industry contexts to publicize climate change risks, legitimate moves towards five-year forward-looking catastrophe models, and to commodify climate risks into financial exposures and assets. These findings draw our attention the (re)insurance industry's dependence on the perpetual multiplication of fear and value via technocientific risk identification, and suggest the profound limitations of attempts to manage climate risks and anxieties through market mechanisms.

Never, in oil’s one and a half century of commercial extraction has the global oil industry’s future been so fraught. The renewable energy transition, an ongoing investment and volatility crisis, the decline in the quality of reserves and current production, renewed fears of geopolitical conflict, and the inherently anarchic character of capitalist oil production have all converged to cast a shadow over the future of oil, and energy as a whole. This dissertation is a combination of four distinct essays, each of which contributes to unraveling the current juncture. My argument, put simply, is that under this convergence, the capitalist renewable energy transition will be plagued by the greatest period of dysfunction the oil industry has ever seen, impacting billions of people around the world in their access to energy during this time. This, what I call, ‘Carbon Purgatory,’ deserves study as this tumultuous period of transition begins.