Logics of Dispossession

Governing by Eviction in Indian Cities

Liza Weinstein

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520423633
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

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.

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Genealogies of Dispossession
• 1. Evictions as Colonial Governing Practice, 1896–1931
• 2. Citizenship Logics After Independence/Partition, 1947–1955
• 3. Emergency Evictions, Electoral Logics, 1975–1985
• 4. Spotlight Scapegoating After Ayodhya, 1992–2002
• 5. Cumulative Logics of Neoliberal Evictions, 2000–2020
• Conclusion: Historicizing Dispossession
• Notes
• References
• Index