Logics of Dispossession

Name: Logics of Dispossession
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ISBN: 9780520423626

Governing by Eviction in Indian Cities

Liza Weinstein

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English

University of California Press
16 June 2026

Urban communities; Sociology; Human geography; Urban & municipal planning

Series: IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change

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.

By: Liza Weinstein
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780520423626
ISBN 10: 0520423623
Series: IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change
Pages: 252
Publication Date: 16 June 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Liza Weinstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR). She is also author of The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai.