This thesis examines the corporate appropriation of human right to water and sanitation discourse. David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession provides the political- economic basis for this analysis while enabling a discussion of water conflicts that looks at neoliberalization strategies beyond the privatization of services. Inspired by Gramsci’s notion of a “war of position”, this thesis investigates the role of corporate appropriation of human right to water and sanitation discourse in legitimating strategies of accumulation by dispossession. Through content and critical discourse analysis of publications of a corporate policy consortium called the 2030 Water Resources Group the investigation concludes that this lobby group simultaneously undermines human rights while actively using key elements of rights discourse to advance its neoliberal water policy objectives.

The general purpose of this thesis is to provide a gendered analysis of the ways in which States use their power to facilitate and promote accumulation, specifically primitive accumulation. I will seek to demonstrate in this study that women, classed and racialised, and especially those migrating within the neo-liberal global political economy are exploited not only through the classical alienation of their labour, but from the application of the additional extra-economic power of patriarchy and the tools that provides to states, and typically male owning classes. Women&rsquo / s position in patriarchal society and patriarchal capitalism may transform their experiences with capital and the state into a relationship of accumulation by dispossession rather than having their labour alienated and exploited under typical expanded reproduction. States use the constructions of women as subordinate under patriarchy, as well as others about migrant labour, or about the &lsquo / aberrant&rsquo / nature of sex work, to justify the use of women&rsquo / s bodies in the sex trade in a way that promotes the primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession of surplus value from their labour and bodies. This study will use the Turkish Republic of northern Cyprus as an example to highlight the arguments made about the ability of a patriarchal state in collusion with capital, to use the extra controls afforded by patriarchy to primitively accumulate wealth from women, and to reproduce that ability on a continuous scale.

My research examines the three interrelated concepts of crisis; new imperialisms, spatial-temporal fix and accumulation by dispossession (ABD) stemming from the work of David Harvey as a way to understand the contested history of the Pakistan Railways. For the first thirty odd years after Pakistan's inception in 1947, the railways, a state-owned institution, was the primary mode of transport for the public, cargo, and workers. Alongside basic infrastructure, the railways had a vast network of hospitals, schools, workers' colonies and an array of physical infrastructure connected to production, operations and other aspects of the economy. The systematic ransack and decline of the Pakistan Railways reached its peak in 2010. Despite several attempts throughout the 1990s by successive democratic and military-led governments backed by the IMF/World Bank in 2015, it was announced that Pakistan railways would be revived under the banner of the 46 billion dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as part of the changing geopolitical context of growing regional connectivity and new Chinese imperialism. By examining the processes that underlie ABD, such as spatial-temporal fix, the following research shows that these processes not only reflect a shift of resources away from the public domain, but in Pakistan also entailed the transformation of the railways from a utilitarian welfare organization to an entity that facilitates looting, unbundling, and dispossession of shared resources and infrastructure.

No description available.

The rush for land has escalated the last decade, with Sub-Saharan Africa as the most targeted region. Governments, local elites and foreign corporations are increasingly taking control over large areas of agricultural lands with the aim of creating higher financial returns and achieve food security. This phenomenon, known as land grabbing, has received a lot of attention worldwide, not least from non-governmental organizations and scholars stressing the negative impacts on rural farmers and families. Yet, several international organizations as well as many African governments keep advocating the positive effects that land grabbing can have on poverty reduction and economic growth. The dominating capitalist and neoliberal view on development, focusing largely on the economic part, undermines the social and environmental impacts that these investments bring. The purpose of this comparative study is therefore to examine, analyze and compare these impacts in Ghana and Ethiopia, two countries heavily affected by land grabbing. This is done through the lens of political ecology, where concepts such as environmental justice, accumulation by dispossession and sustainable rural livelihoods will be of particular significance. Based on a systematic literature review, the results show that land grabbing projects, said to aim at stimulating economic and social development, have resulted in dispossessions, injustices and environmental conflicts wherein indigenous communities have been deeply affected. Their traditional livelihoods, based mainly on cultivation, fishing, gathering and hunting, have been threatened by several impacts from the land grabs. These include loss of land, declined access to resources, damaged ecosystems, deforestation and lack of alternative ways to maintain food security.

Until the 1970s, small black fishing communities primarily populated Bahia’s north coast. A recent demand for luxury coastal real estate has radically altered the region’s social and environmental landscape. While Bahia’s population is roughly 80% poor and black, the coast is now a space of exclusivity and whiteness. Sewage infrastructure does not meet the needs of the growing population. Domestic sewage flows directly into urban rivers. Poor black fishers, whose food security and livelihoods depend on access to healthy water resources, suffer most in this context. This dissertation explores two interlinking forms of environmental racism – water pollution and racial profiling – that fishers in Praia de Buraquinho, Bahia, Brazil, experience daily. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research, this project follows the lives of 75 fishers enmeshed in a struggle for environmental and racial justice. I uncover how coastal development has polluted the community's primary river fishery while private gated communities physically restrict fishers' access and subject them to racial profiling practices by private security guards. Ultimately, I argue that regional coastal development in Bahia represents a new model of capital accumulation through what I call “racialized environmental dispossession” that, as one Praia de Buraquinho fishers suggests, is "like watching a brother die."

Dispossession has been playing a central role in capitalist accumulation over the last four-hundred-year history of modern capitalism. This dissertation theorizes how dispossession contributes to producing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production in Bangladesh. To do so, the dissertation empirically examines three interrelated aspects of dispossession in its three analytical chapters. First, it explores how the state and the market work in tandem to organize and control dispossession while grabbing land and expelling peasants from their places. Next, it investigates how dispossession contributes to providing 'potential capitals,' such as grabbed land and dispossessed peasants, to the production sites to be converted into 'constant capital' and 'variable capital' and to creating antagonistic class relations. Finally, it explores how market and non-market actors control those dispossessed peasants-turned-workers inside and outside factories to produce surplus values in order to reproduce the capitalist system locally and globally. These three interactive components of dispossession show three successive phases of capitalist accumulation: land-grabbing by divorcing independent producers from their livelihoods (the initial phase), converting land into capital, peasants into wage workers, and non-capitalists into capitalists (the intermediate phase), and controlling and exploiting those wage workers to produce surpluses or a cycle of new capital (the final phase). This dissertation accordingly advances a full-scale theory of dispossession in its concluding chapter by examining how the starting, intermediate, and ending points of dispossession contribute to capitalist accumulation. The dissertation draws on a wide range of empirical evidence collected from Panthapath, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These include 77 life histories, 50 interviews, a land-use survey of 1,007 structures, and a short survey of 147 slums. It also uses various historical records and archival documents. The three major findings of this dissertation are as follows. First, the dissertation shows that the state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with the private sector, but also in direct competition with the market. Not only does the state monopolize extra-economic means to grab land, but the market also often gains access to extra-economic means. Next, the dissertation shows that dispossession works to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence labor, create antagonistic class relations, and redistribute wealth upward. Finally, the dissertation identifies a new regime of labor control, called social despotism, that dominates and exploits workers in factories to produce surpluses. I conclude this study with policy recommendations designed to address the various dimensions of structural injustice described in this dissertation. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation theorizes how dispossession contributes to producing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production in Bangladesh. In its three analytical chapters, the dissertation empirically examines three interrelated aspects of dispossession. First, it explores how the state and the market work in tandem to organize and control dispossession while grabbing land and expelling peasants from their places. Next, it investigates how dispossession contributes to providing grabbed land and dispossessed peasants to the production sites and to creating various class hierarchies. Finally, it explores how market and non-market actors control peasants-turned-workers inside and outside factories to produce surplus values in order to reproduce the capitalist system. These three interactive components of dispossession show three successive phases of capitalist accumulation: land-grabbing by evicting peasants from their places (phase 1), converting land into capital, peasants into wage workers, and non-capitalists into capitalists (phase 2), and exploiting wage workers to produce surpluses (phase 3). This dissertation accordingly advances a full-scale theory of dispossession in its concluding chapter by examining how the starting, intermediate, and ending points of dispossession contribute to capitalist accumulation. The dissertation draws on a wide range of empirical evidence collected from Panthapath, Dhaka, Bangladesh. These include 77 life histories, 50 interviews, a land-use survey of 1,007 structures, and a short survey of 147 slums. It also uses various historical records and archival documents. Some of the major findings of this dissertation are as follows. First, the dissertation shows that the state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with the private sector, but also in direct competition with the market. Not only does the state monopolize extra-economic means to grab land, but the market also often gains access to extra-economic means. Next, the dissertation shows that dispossession works to privatize the commons, proletarianize subsistence labor, create exploitative class relations, and redistribute wealth upward. Finally, the dissertation identifies a new regime of labor control, called social despotism, that oppresses and exploits workers in factories to produce surpluses.

The theoretical framework of accumulation by dispossession allows for a critical examination of urban development projects within neoliberalism (Harvey, 2009; Swyngedouw, Moulaert & Rodriguez, 2002). Within the same neoliberal paradigm, sports mega-events have come to play a significant role for urban regeneration and policy-making (Hall, 2006). Meanwhile attending to the well-documented cases of mass-evictions and reduction of standard housing rights as a recurrent consequence of cities hosting such events (Blunden, 2012), we believe that such a critical examination is arguably important in order to do justice to these kinds of urban regeneration projects. In this paper we analyse, by a case study approach, how mega-events amplify and accelerate the process of accumulation by dispossession. We attend to the development of the Olympic Park and Olympic Village, Barra da Tijuca, in preparation for the Rio 2016 Games, as well as the neighbouring community of Vila Autódromo. By analysing different types of source material, we discuss how the mechanisms of privatisation and entrepreneurialism are reflected in our case; understood as two important mechanisms that facilitate the process of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2009).

Privatization, which is the most important component of neo-liberal policies since the 1980s, has been legitimized by the neo-liberal doctrine through a purely economic and technical terminology. Contrary to this, this thesis maintains that privatization is a highly political process, shaped by intertwined class- and identity-based interests in different countries. To support this argument, the thesis makes a comparative analysis of the privatizations of large-scale state economic enterprises in Turkey in the 2000s, namely Petrol Ofisi, T&Uuml / PRAS, ERDEMIR, T&uuml / rk Telekom and PETKIM, as part of the neo-liberal transformation of the Turkish state. It concludes that the privatizations of large-scale SEEs in Turkey represent typical examples to what David Harvey terms as &ldquo / accumulation by dispossession&rdquo / throughout which wealth has been transferred from the laboring classes to capital by the active involvement of the state though the Turkish experience has its own historical specificities. Political preferences made by governments in charge since the late 1990s in general and by the Islamist AKP government after 2002 in particular have to be understood to make sense of these specificities.

O presente estudo aborda as práticas de acumulação por expropriação e espoliação e seus impactos na organização e reprodução do espaço local de Santa Cruz, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, a partir da articulação entre diferentes escalas sócio-espaciais e como estas estratégias são acionadas pelo capital através de práticas imperialistas que visam a recomposição do ciclo de crescimento. Para tanto, a dissertação elege o grupo empresarial TKCSA - ThyssenKrupp Companhia Siderúrgica do Atlântico, um empreendimento multinacional com atuação na cadeia produtiva da industria siderúrgica, oriundo da Alemanha. Pretende-se fazer um estudo sobre os discursos e as práticas de resistência e de denúncia, mobilizados pela sociedade civil organizada, acerca da produção e distribuição desigual e territorialmente localizada dos danos e riscos sócio-ambientais sobre segmentos da população residente e trabalhadora local. / This study looks at the practices of accumulation by dispossession and plunder and their impacts on the organization and reproduction of the local area of Santa Cruz, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, from the articulation between different socio-spatial scales and how these strategies are driven by capital through imperialist practices aimed at the recovery of the growth cycle. Therefore, the dissertation business group elects TKCSA - ThyssenKrupp Atlantic Steel Company, an enterprise with multinational operations in the steel industry supply chain, from Germany. In order to make a study of the discourses and practices of resistance and denunciation, mobilized by civil society organizations, on the production and distribution uneven and geographically localized damage and socio-environmental risks on segments of the population living and working place.