Logics of Dispossession: Governing by Eviction in Indian Cities

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...