Logics of Dispossession

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.