Doctoral Dissertation Research: Extra-Territorial Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Politics of Development

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project will explore emerging questions in geopolitics about interactions among extra-territorial sovereignty (the power nation-states exert over people and places outside their borders), state-building, ethnic nationalism, and multi-ethnic contestations over space, place, and political expression.  The project will focus on the ways through which foreign direct investments and foreign investments in infrastructure development legitimize practices of extra-territorial sovereignty, how state security operates to monitor and control the livelihoods of marginalized populations, and how those populations then navigate the restrictions placed upon them.  The investigators will analyze the way contemporary social, political, and cultural transformations condition how different ethnic groups attach meaning to and claim geographic places and how extra-territorial sovereignty shapes the politics of development and produces new political beliefs, expectations, and experiences.  The project will provide an empirical test of new theories emanating from feminist geopolitical thought that will advance scholarly engagements with affect, emotion, memory, and everyday practices to better understand macro-scale geopolitics.  It also will contribute understanding about how state and extra-territorial sovereignties interact to impact individuals in their everyday lives. The project also will provide support to enable a graduate student to establish an independent research career.   Through an ethnographic case study of Chinese economic and political influence in Nepal, the doctoral student will investigate the following set of core questions: (1) How do the seemingly banal, everyday, and gendered practices of Tibetan nationalism and place making in one part of Kathmandu reveal the messy intricacies of Chinese extra-territorial politics of development in Nepal?  (2) How do Chinese extra-territorial sovereignty and Nepali ethnic nationalism produce Tibetan refugee subjectivities in Nepal?  (3) How do place based identity politics and Nepali ethnic nationalism produce contestations between Tibetan refugees and members of other ethnic groups in Nepal?  The recent intensification of Chinese politico-economic influence in Nepal makes this project significant and timely.  In addition to providing new insights regarding this specific case, the project will have great value in helping to better understand the complex political, cultural, and socioeconomic dynamics among people and states in a broader range of other settings of interest to the U.S. from a national security and foreign affairs perspective.  The doctoral student will employ a combination of qualitative research methods, including interviews, focus groups, participant observation, visual methods, and content/discourse analysis.  Using these methods, the student will examine how everyday interactions, events, and practices reveal the intricacies of macro-scale geopolitics.  In doing so, this dissertation will provide additional linkages between feminist political geography and geographies of sovereignty and territory.