I conducted a set of literature reviews on "the built environment of conflict" regarding the structures erected by the police and paramilitary forces that blocked New Delhi during the world's largest protests, the Farmers' Protests in India (variously called "Delhi Challo," "Bharat Bandh"). Below is a description from Dr. Emily Gade's book project on the "built environment of conflict" which details some of the key questions I investigated in the literature reviews using natural language processing of Twitter data, multimedia methods and image inferencing, as well as a deep dive through seven months of news articles related to the construction of the barricades.
Summary:
Summary:
States today regularly encounter a tension between defending their public from “terrorist” threats (real and imagined) that challenge their security, on one hand, and avoiding overtly targeting minority subsets of their populous with undue rights restrictions, on the other. A purportedly innocuous solution for states is to increase “nonviolent” measures of state control—such as checkpoints and closure obstacles—actions, which states justify as necessary to ensure security.
States’ built environments of conflict are material manifestations of state power that certain, targeted citizens experience as violence. Because many more people pass through checkpoints, past guard towers, and around closure obstacles then experience direct violence (being shot, for example), these built environments in become a powerful symbol of the state. This state power selectively surveilles and disciplines individual behavior; disrupts social and community life; inhibits economic productivity; and instills physical violence, humiliation, and frustration.
