Geopolitical assemblages and disasters-in-the-making in Kalimpong, India

Abstract

This article argues that landslides ought to be understood as geopolitical processes. The argument is based on a study into the causes and impacts of landslides in Kalimpong District, West Bengal, India. The article is based on six months of qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2019 and early 2020. Several semi-structured interviews with both landslide victims and some other key informants provide most of the data for the article. This was complemented by field notes and other ethnographic methods. Landslide prone Kalimpong District sits mostly in The Eastern Himalayan foothills and is West Bengal's newest district, annexed from Darjeeling district in 2017. That year also saw the third major uprising of a century-long movement for a separate Indian state of Gorkhaland, of which Kalimpong would be a part. The intersections of that movement and its drivers with disaster risk and its management in Kalimpong are the primary focus of the article. I make sense of these intersections by advancing a conceptual framework that combines assemblage-based geographical theories of disaster risk and the concept of geopolitical assemblages. This allows me to, by narrating people's experiences and understandings of three specific landslides, illustrate that geopolitical processes make landslides possible and then exacerbate and prolong their impacts. The article makes novel theoretical contributions to geographical literatures on infrastructure, geopolitics, and hazards. It also provides a critical, contemporary overview of the geopolitical context of the Eastern Himalayas.