Movements that change the world also change the ways in which we know and understand the world. Activists produce knowledge as they try to find answers to the questions they face in struggle – questions about the issues they mobilise around, about the opposition that they face from above, [...]
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On 1 January, 2014, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR) – India’s new law on land acquisition, rehabilitation and resettlement – came into force after a particularly long and tortuous trajectory through the country’s [...]
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Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical [...]
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Are social movements in contemporary India a driving force for democratic deepening? This is the question at the heart of a new edited volume that Kenneth Bo Nielsen and I have recently published in Palgrave’s excellent book series Rethinking International Development.
Our book [...]
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In his classic work Europe and the People Without History, Eric Wolf launched a broadside against the methodological nationalism of sociology. The discipline, he argued, was wedded to the idea that “social relations take place within the charmed circle of the single nation-state”. [...]
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When Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (PTSC) – a rigorous critique of the work of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty – made its appearance in 2013, it met with a highly polarised reception. For some Marxist critics, the book constituted a [...]
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How do subaltern groups negotiate and resist dispossession, disenfranchisement and stigma in neoliberal India? This is the question at the heart of a recently published volume, which I have co-edited with Srila Roy, entitled New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance [...]
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How do the oppositional political projects of subaltern groups engage with the state? This very basic question has been at the heart of my research for a long time, and it is also the core concern of an article that I recently published in Journal of Contemporary Asia, with the title [...]
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