'Logics of Dispossession: Governing By Eviction in Indian Cities'

A book launch with author Dr. Liza Weinstein (Northeastern) in conversation with two discussants, Professor Claire Colomb (Cambridge University) and Dr Paolo Novak (SOAS), and chaired by Dr Sarah El-Kazaz.

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 1,000 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.