Authoritarian urbanism beyond the city: Infrastructure-led extended urbanisation and India’s more-than-neoliberal configurations
基于印度高速公路走廊的田野调查，研究国家通过基础设施驱动城市化向边缘地区扩展时产生的威权主义和社会分裂，揭示基础设施项目如何与宗教民族主义结合，加剧社会不平等。
In the context of the prevailing global rightward and populist shift, there exists a largely unexplored yet profound nexus between authoritarian neoliberalism and infrastructure-led extended urbanisation beyond the city. Drawing on insights from extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted along India’s highway corridors, this paper examines the authoritarianism and social fragmentation inherent in the state’s attempts to extend infrastructure-led urbanisation into economically bypassed regions. By exploring the intersections between the construction of recent highway corridors through previously bypassed regions inhabited by marginalised religious and caste groups and the outbreak of state-backed violence, this paper analyses authoritarian urbanism emerging amidst social struggles over enclosure and urbanisation of agrarian land. Specifically, the paper delves in depth into the planning of two recent highway corridors – the Delhi–Mumbai Expressway and the India–Myanmar–Thailand highway – and the escalation of state-sponsored religious conflicts and polarisation in the regions these corridors traverse. This research demonstrates how national-scale infrastructure projects, such as the Bharatmala highway programme, allow for the framing of a national-popular project that selectively incorporates hegemonic socio-religious groups such as certain Hindu caste groups who have reaped the primary benefits of economic liberalisation while disenfranchising marginalised communities. The paper defines authoritarian urbanism as a more-than-neoliberal configuration emerging from a toxic amalgamation of state power, bellicose militarism, infrastructure-led urbanisation and religious nationalism. It concludes that this emerging authoritarian urbanism obscures the neoliberal crises of jobless growth and fails to address the uneven development and social inequalities resulting from infrastructure-led urbanisation.