Narmala Halstead (University of East London, UK)
Grounding the extra-territorial local: violence, agency and new boundaries
This paper considers the processes in which people inhabit an external imaginary in Guyana where citizens are 'absentee' as well as 'violently present'. In exploring the relationships between citizens and state which alternate from distance and structural violence to state scrutiny and legality, the paper brings out mobility as agency and new forms of citizenship. These interactions become attempts to ground 'open borders'. People and officials invoke notions of law and or 'display' illegality to extract a particular local from the extra-territorial and thus, 'rebound' that which is mobile and as part of the state. In particular, allegations of extra-judicial killings and police torture bring out the state's 'visibility' in relation to disorder and illegality. However, this focus also isolates and re-territorialises the state. At the same time, the local obtains new status: the allegations occur within new freedoms for media as part of emerging localised public spheres in the imaginary.
