Logics of Dispossession

Governing by Eviction in Indian Cities
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-520-42362-6
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 252 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change

A new “bulldozer politics” has taken hold in many Indian cities, destroying neighborhoods and displacing city residents as it pursues a global city aesthetic. Presentist accounts might explain these evictions as emergent modes of capital accumulation, but Logics of Dispossession challenges that story and situates these acts in a longer historical durée.

Employing a comparative genealogical approach to historical analysis, Liza Weinstein traces the Indian government’s power to evict—from its beginnings in the colonial capitals of the British Raj, to developmental state-building projects and the rise of ethnonationalist politics, up to the present neoliberal conjuncture. Drawing on multicity fieldwork, archival research, and a database of more than a thousand eviction cases, Weinstein argues that evictions constitute a historically entrenched tool of city governance, motivated by a shifting set of intersecting, often contradictory logics that have accumulated over time and in locally specific ways across Indian cities aspiring to be world-class.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weinstein, Liza

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Historische & Regionale Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Regional- & Raumplanung Stadtplanung, Kommunale Planung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ContentsList of Figures AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Genealogies of Dispossession  Chapter 1. Evictions as Colonial Governing Practice, 1896–1931Chapter 2. Citizenship Logics After Independence/Partition, 1947–1955Chapter 3. Emergency Evictions, Electoral Logics, 1975–1985Chapter 4. Spotlight Scapegoating After Ayodhya, 1992–2002Chapter 5. Cumulative Logics of Neoliberal Evictions, 2000–2020Conclusion: Historicizing Dispossession NotesReferencesIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Liza Weinstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR). She is also author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai.