Acquiescence in the face of dispossession in the Mahindra World City Special Economic Zone, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Scholarship on community responses to land grabs for Special Economic Zones (SEZs) has overwhelmingly analysed cases of mobilization against SEZs or the subsequent trajectories of anti-dispossession struggles. We build on the role of the neoliberal broker state developed within this scholarship as well as theories on state and capital rescaling, and quiescence to power to explain the production of acquiescence to dispossession. Our in-depth case study of a large SEZ, the Mahindra World City (MWC) in Tamil Nadu, India, argues that acquiescence is produced in part by a multiscalar broker state that uses several intersecting strategies. These include threatening landowners with coercive eminent domain, facilitating market-based land acquisition by rescaled private capital that operates through a locally embedded network of brokers who persuade landowners, and utilizing the gains from brokerage to finance a populist welfare state that cushions the adverse impacts of dispossession. The use of customized market-based compensation further individualizes the experience of dispossession in an urbanizing context with no living memories of prior collective mobilization against dispossession. The multiscalar state thus intersects with rescaled capital in and through coercive, persuasive, and selected welfare strategies variously employed at the subnational and local scales to blunt resistance and produce acquiescence in the face of dispossession. Examining the decade long process of land acquisition in the MWC SEZ helps us theorize an evolving broker state and understand why it remains largely uncontested in contemporary rent-driven development.