Absent-Present Migrants and Hybrid Governance in Encroached Peripheries: Gendered Authority and Internal Mobility in Peri-Urban Pakistan

Across world regions, peri-urban spaces have become critical sites of socio-spatial transformation as expanding metropolitan corridors absorb formerly agrarian settlements. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in South Asia, where rapid urbanization, weak planning regimes, and land commodification intensify pressures on rural-urban fringes. In Pakistan, the urban population has grown from 35% in 2000 to over 40% today, with peri-urban belts absorbing much of this expansion. These shifts intersect with longstanding gendered inequalities, as although women constitute roughly 67% of the agricultural workforce, they own only 4% of land, making them especially vulnerable as land transitions from subsistence-use to market assets. At the same time, long-standing patterns of rural to urban migration, driven by the search for more stable livelihoods, have produced dispersed households in which key decision-makers reside in cities while retaining ancestral ownership in the villages they have left behind. Although these intersecting processes fundamentally reconfigure how authority, governance, and gendered access to land are negotiated, scholarship on migration governance and peripheral spaces remains dominated by European cases and international migration, leaving internal mobility and gendered rural-urban configurations in the Global South largely under-examined. This study expands our earlier field-based research in peri-urban Rawalpindi (Waheed, 2025) by examining how mobility trajectories, those who stay, those who circulate, and those who migrate to the city, reconfigure governance regimes in peripheralized peri-urban settings. In doing so, it introduces the concept of ‘absent-present migrants’ to analyze urban-based heirs who, while physically distant, exercise decisive influence over land redistribution, inheritance, and negotiations with developers and bureaucratic intermediaries. The study asks three questions: (1) How do varied mobility trajectories shape local decision-making over land in peri-urban Rawalpindi? (2) How do absent-present migrants participate in governing land, inheritance, and redevelopment? (3) How do women navigate, contest, or are marginalized within these multi-layered regimes of authority under conditions of marketization and legal pluralism? Drawing on multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, including life-history interviews with resident landowners, urban-dwelling external heirs, and women across different household configurations, alongside case-tracing of land decisions, the analysis identifies three key findings. First, internal mobility restructures governance authority as although resident men manage day-to-day affairs, strategic decisions increasingly shift to absent-present migrants, whose urban institutional access and financial leverage recalibrate local hierarchies. Second, governance unfolds through interlocking but competing regimes, where elders, bureaucratic functionaries, and market intermediaries each advance partial claims to authority, producing patterned frictions that enable some actors to manoeuvre across institutional boundaries while excluding others. Third, women’s authority remains structurally constrained but situationally enacted as women often play critical roles in mediating disputes and influencing outcomes in contexts where male absence destabilizes established authority structures. The paper thus, extends centre/periphery debates by demonstrating how internal mobility reshapes governance at the margins, offering a framework for understanding authority in rapidly transforming peripheral, non-urban places. Reference Waheed, S. Encroaching cities, enduring inequalities: navigating gendered land governance and symbolic violence amidst urban-encroachment and spatio-economic transitions in Peri-urban Pakistan. GeoJournal 90, 241(2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-025-11491-6