Following the discovery of sizable offshore petroleum deposits off the southeastern coast of Mtwara Region in Tanzania, state and private-sector representatives assured Mtwara residents that they would see intensive government investment in local infrastructure and industry. In light of these pledges, Mtwara residents anticipated that gas refineries, processing plants, and new infrastructure would soon bring employment opportunities to the historically underdeveloped southeast. By 2012, however, state plans to transport the gas from Mtwara to metropolitan Dar es Salaam via a pipeline threatened expectations of regional revitalization. Following official state confirmation of the pipeline in May 2013, residents mounted a series of demonstrations to oppose the government plan from which they had largely been excluded. In response to the protest, the central government deployed the national guard in an unprecedented exercise of military power.In this dissertation, I argue that the 2013 protest reflect the existence and influence of two national development imaginaries that evoke conflicting understandings of development, citizenship, and the state. On one hand, many government workers and CSO officers promoted images of the state as unbeholden to citizen demands for widespread, enduring development as entailed within the neoliberal-extractivist imaginary. In line with the social-development imaginary, however, Mtwara residents interpreted government promises of natural gas wealth as state recognition for Mtwara's sustained underdevelopment and past nationalistic sacrifices. Through their protests, Mtwara residents challenged the central government's vision for national development through state authorization of global capital investment in natural resource extraction.Drawing from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and focus group sessions conducted from February 2015 to March 2016 in Mtwara and Dar es Salaam, I trace Mtwara residents' invocations of the two development imaginaries across three critical settings: the development work of three Mtwara-based civil society organizations; the bureaucratic procedure and protocol of local government offices; and residents' memorialization of the 2013 violence. According to literature (Ferguson 2005, 2006), concentrated areas of global capital investment in extractive projects form enclaves, dis-embedded from the historical and moral contexts of their host countries. Communities in Mtwara, however, sought to complicate the production of a dis-embedded mineral enclave by continuing to make development claims on the state.
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