Linked (im)mobilities and the relational politics of movement in post-earthquake Nepal

ABSTRACT

This article highlights the importance of various (im)mobilities that were induced by the massive 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on 25 April 2015. It analyzes over 120 news articles published in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, arranging these into a mobility-centric narrative that highlights the politics of movement in the disaster’s wake. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological “mobilities turn”, I introduce the concept of linked (im)mobilities to demonstrate the complex dialectics structuring (im)mobilities after the disaster. More specifically, Nepal’s post-earthquake (im)mobilities intersected with one another and with a variety of geographic and political factors to produce a mutually constitutive web of contingent movements. Attending to these not only underscores the centrality of (im)mobilities themselves. By raising questions of scale, inequality, bordering, and “islanding”, the approach advanced here widens our analytical frame. It offers a conceptual architecture capable of encompassing more factors (beyond mobility), thereby facilitating a broader understanding of the disaster event and its various outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Linked (im)mobilities
• post-disaster
• Nepal earthquake
• infrastructure
• new mobilities paradigm
• politics of mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Benjamin Linder is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology & Geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His primary research explores the relationship between transnational mobilities, urban space, and cultural transformation in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Notes

1. This report presents the quantitative data in much greater detail. However, the Nepali satisfaction rates (“very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied”) with various players break down as follows: Nepal Army (88%), police (88%), Armed Police Force (86%), foreign governments (67%), INGOs (65%), NGOs (61%), central administration (57%), and local administration (59%). The only institutions below majority satisfaction were private business groups (44%), religious groups (45%), and political parties (34%). It is worth noting that the second phase – a year after the earthquake – of this longitudinal study found decreases in some of these satisfaction responses, particularly regarding the army, police, businesses, and foreign governments (Asia Foundation 2016). However, the general findings described above maintained. I focus on the early reports here because this article is specifically concerned with the disaster’s initial aftermath.

2. This is the period of time between the earthquake of April 25 and the smaller one that hit Nepal on May 12. This window of time provides a somewhat arbitrary, but nevertheless useful, boundary to the study undertaken here.

3. Like anything else, however, airports are not wholly immobile on a long enough timeline, as Julie Cidell’s (2013) work on Chicago’s “O’Hare Modernization Program” reminds us. As Adey (2006, 2010) argues, nothing is totally immobile, but only relatively so.

4. In the interest of avoiding redundancy, I have chosen to omit the year of publication when referencing news articles. All media sources examined for this research were published in 2015.

5. Gurkhas are Nepali soldiers serving in special regiments of the British and Indian armies. Such Nepali forces have a long history in these militaries dating back to the British colonial period in India. To this day, the term Gurkha connotes bravery, strength, and elite military competence. For more on the Gurkhas and their history, see Des Chene (1991), Farwell (1984), and Caplan (1991).

6. For more on the long-term history of such inequality in Nepal, the work of Mahesh C. Regmi is unparalleled. See especially Thatched Huts and Stucco Palaces (1978).

7. That being said, the comprehensive report from the Asia Foundation (2015a, 2015b) takes a generally favorable view of the government’s response.

8. Upon a bit more reflection, however, using the term lucky obfuscates the major structural inequalities at play. It was not “luck” that saved the tourists, but rather structural geopolitics and inequality through and through.

9. This excellent work, however, was subject to its own sort of diminishing returns. In a public discussion at the 2015 Annual Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya in Kathmandu, the panelist Austin Lord mentioned that, as the days and weeks wore on, people began to submit multiple and exaggerated reports to QuakeMap, essentially “gaming” the system to procure more relief attention.

10. Sharrock made this argument in a presentation at Tribhuvan University’s 2nd annual Nepali Anthropology conference in Lalitpur, Nepal (16–18 December 2016).

11. Pelling and Dill’s (2010) primary focus is on the way in which citizens relate to the state, a product of their argument’s foundation in liberal political theory and traditional notions of the social contract. However, the general conceptual point they make can easily apply to other political scales as well, including the relevant geopolitical and supra-national scales considered briefly here.