Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Biographic Data
| ID | 133230 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alf Gunvald Nilsen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alf Gunvald |
| FAMILY NAME | Nilsen |
| SIGNATURE | NILSEN A G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4038-4400 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 136 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Violence of Hindu Nationalist Statecraft
The Hindu nationalist movement’s ideological vision has been systematically pursued through the use of state-sanctioned violence. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, this strategy has relied on both grassroots activism and vigilantism and a form of statecraft implemented through legislation at state and federal levels to marginalize Muslims and other minorities. In the process, India’s secular democracy has been tra…
Relocations of Hindutva: Hindu Nationalism Under Modi 3.0
Southern interregnum: Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa
Emerging Powers and the Political Economy of the Southern Interregnum
Afterword: Whither Hindu nationalism and its others
Hindu nationalist statecraft, dog-whistle legislation, and the vigilante state in contemporary India
The ideology and politics of Hindu nationalism has always been predicated on an antagonistic discursive construction of ‘dangerous others,’ notably Muslims but also Christians. This construct has served to define India as first and foremost a Hindu nation, thereby de facto relegating religious minorities to the status of not properly belonging to the nation. However, under the leadership of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu national…
Theorizing Law, Social Movements, and State Formation in India
With the rise of Hindu nationalist statecraft under the Modi regime, India finds itself at a perilous conjuncture that compels a critical rethinking of the political economy of the world's largest democracy. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for doing so, centered on a Gramscian rethinking of the relationship among law, social movements, and state formation in the longue durée of Indian democracy. Working across three hegemonic t…
Contesting resources, contesting the nation
This article is part of a Book Forum review of Sanjib Baruah’s book In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast (2020). The Book Forum consists of individual commentaries on this text by five interested scholars, followed by a response by the author. The article may be read individually or alongside the other contributions to the Forum, which together constitute a comprehensive discussion of the themes and arguments in the book
India’s Evolving Neoliberal Regime of Dispossession: From the Anti-SEZ Movement to the Farm Law Protests
What do the protests against the farm laws of the Modi regime tell us about the trajectory of neoliberalisation in India? In this article, we address this question through a comparative analysis of the farm law protests and movements against land dispossession that mushroomed in many parts of India in the wake of the passing of India's SEZ Act in 2005. Both movements have explicitly targeted neoliberal policies that aggressively sought to remove …
Destroying Democracy: Neoliberal capitalism and the rise of authoritarian politics
India’s pandemic: Spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation
This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India’s Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country’s devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed…
Give James Ferguson a Fish
When James Ferguson's Give a Man a Fish was published in 2015, it seemed to many that the anthropologist was continuing his trailblazing work in critical development research and pioneering a new imaginary for a progressive left politics of welfare. This article argues that such enthusiasm is misplaced and that we need to devote ourselves to a more rigorous and ambitious project if we are to forge a social theory for the future that holds any kin…
Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft
What role does the Islamophobic theory of "love jihad" play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft-the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology-in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of "love jihad" relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grou…
Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations
The Gender Effect: Capitalism, Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development
Every now and then, a book comes along that has the potential to widen the compass and shift the terms of debate in a research field in a decisive manner. Kathryn Moeller’s The Gender Effect is precisely such a book for the field of global development studies, and especially for critical research on the politics of gender, poverty, and development. Of course, the fact that women in the global South have come to occupy a pivotal role in neoliberal…
India’s Turn to Rights-Based Legislation (2004–2014): A Critical Review of the Literature
This article surveys the academic literature on rights-based legislation and critically discusses key findings and arguments that emerge from this literature. I conduct this survey and discussion in light of a wider understanding of the political economy of Indian democracy as resilient but limited in terms of substantial forms of redistribution and recognition in favour of subaltern groups. This contradiction has arguably become especially prono…
Rising powers, people rising: Neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries
The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These soc…
Mapping the World's Largest Democracy (1947-2017)
After seven decades as an independent democratic nation, India's social landscape remains marred by persistent contradictions and inequalities. As the country moves from celebrating 70 years of independence towards its seventeenth general election in 2019, this article sets out to survey what democracy has done to India over the past 70 years. How was Indian democracy established and how has it evolved? Why do people vote, and who do they vote fo…
Passages from Marxism to Postcolonialism: A Comment on Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
The 2013 publication of Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has reignited debates over the relative merits and demerits of Marxism and postcolonialism. This article reviews the debate and raises some critical questions about Chibber's engagement with questions pertaining to universalism and capitalist development. Focusing on Chibber's critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, the article contends th…
Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda
This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development i…
Globalizing Sociology: An Introduction
Much of the work that has gone into the making of this special issue has taken place in the context of South Africa, where the nation's universities have been sites of turmoil and protest for more than a year now.The origins of the protests that culminated in the FeesMustFall movement that swept across many of the country's campuses can be traced to a campaign that erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015.Led by a coalition of s…
Real, practical emancipation
Th is article explores the articulations of citizenship in subaltern politics in contemporary India. I flesh out this argument through a detailed analysis of Adivasi mobilization in western Madhya Pradesh, India. My analysis shows how the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, a local social movement in the region, democratized local state-society relations by appropriating basic democratic idioms and turning these against local state personnel and the violent…
For a Historical Sociology of State–Society Relations in the Study of Subaltern Politics
This chapter presents a dense historical and theoretical discussion of how state-society relations have been theorized in both the Subaltern Studies project and in more recent Foucauldian studies of subaltern politics. The chapter argues that both perspectives fail, to fully appreciate the production of subaltern political agency and its containment in and through the state, and how subalterns use the full resources of ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’…
New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India
This title presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacies of Subaltern Studies and the evolving forms of hegemony and resistance in contemporary India. From the struggles of the urban poor in Gujarat to the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenf…
Subalterns and the State in theLongue Durée: Notes from "The Rebellious Century" in the Bhil Heartland
Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular res…
Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation
This article explores how, in the context of an unfolding process of neoliberalisation in India, new terrains of resistance are crystallising for subaltern groups seeking to contest the marginalising consequences of this process. We focus particularly on the emergence of India's ‘new rights agenda’ through a study of the making of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2013. Conc…
Social Movements Research and the ‘Movement of Movements’: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation
This article explores the state of research on the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and…
Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda
This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development i…
Hindu nationalist statecraft, dog-whistle legislation, and the vigilante state in contemporary India
The ideology and politics of Hindu nationalism has always been predicated on an antagonistic discursive construction of ‘dangerous others,’ notably Muslims but also Christians. This construct has served to define India as first and foremost a Hindu nation, thereby de facto relegating religious minorities to the status of not properly belonging to the nation. However, under the leadership of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu national…
India’s Evolving Neoliberal Regime of Dispossession: From the Anti-SEZ Movement to the Farm Law Protests
What do the protests against the farm laws of the Modi regime tell us about the trajectory of neoliberalisation in India? In this article, we address this question through a comparative analysis of the farm law protests and movements against land dispossession that mushroomed in many parts of India in the wake of the passing of India's SEZ Act in 2005. Both movements have explicitly targeted neoliberal policies that aggressively sought to remove …
Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft
What role does the Islamophobic theory of "love jihad" play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft-the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology-in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of "love jihad" relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grou…
Give James Ferguson a Fish
When James Ferguson's Give a Man a Fish was published in 2015, it seemed to many that the anthropologist was continuing his trailblazing work in critical development research and pioneering a new imaginary for a progressive left politics of welfare. This article argues that such enthusiasm is misplaced and that we need to devote ourselves to a more rigorous and ambitious project if we are to forge a social theory for the future that holds any kin…
Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects
In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the devel…
Globalizing Sociology: An Introduction
Much of the work that has gone into the making of this special issue has taken place in the context of South Africa, where the nation's universities have been sites of turmoil and protest for more than a year now.The origins of the protests that culminated in the FeesMustFall movement that swept across many of the country's campuses can be traced to a campaign that erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015.Led by a coalition of s…
Adivasi Mobilization in Contemporary India: Democratizing the Local State
This article addresses the political aspects of the structural marginalization of Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) in India. Relating to critical debates about the changing nature of state-society relations in India, the article assesses the argument that the best way for social movements in India to advance their oppositional projects is to harness the state to their attempts to deepen democracy and advance subaltern emancipation. The trajectories of…
Emerging Powers and the Political Economy of the Southern Interregnum
Mapping the World's Largest Democracy (1947-2017)
After seven decades as an independent democratic nation, India's social landscape remains marred by persistent contradictions and inequalities. As the country moves from celebrating 70 years of independence towards its seventeenth general election in 2019, this article sets out to survey what democracy has done to India over the past 70 years. How was Indian democracy established and how has it evolved? Why do people vote, and who do they vote fo…
Subalterns and the State in theLongue Durée: Notes from "The Rebellious Century" in the Bhil Heartland
Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular res…
Against the Current, From Below: Resisting Dispossession in the Narmada Valley, India
This article presents a comprehensive analysis of popular resistance to dam building in the Narmada Valley, India. Like Indian dam projects more generally, the Narmada projects are characterized by a distributional bias in favor of India's “dominant proprietary classes” and, it is argued, must be understood in terms of the political economy of postcolonial capitalism in India. The article then traces the emergence of popular resistance to disposs…
The authors and the actors of their own drama: Towards a Marxist theory of social movements
Marxism is a body of theory that emanated from and was crafted for social movements. Yet, paradoxically, it does not contain a theory that specifically explains the emergence, character and development of social movements. This article works towards the formulation of a Marxist theory of social movements. Grounded in Marx's philosophical anthropology, it argues for an ontological conception of social movements, and outlines a series of concepts f…
On New Social Movements and ‘The Reinvention of India’
The focal point of this article is the role of new social movements in the process which has been denoted as ‘the reinvention of India’, and in particular, the way in which the politics of these movements is analysed and represented in academic perspectives. Two areas form the focus of the discussion: firstly, the assertion that India's NSMs represent voices of ‘otherness’ emanating from beyond the postcolonial development project and articulatin…
Rising powers, people rising: Neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries
The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These soc…
Real, practical emancipation
Th is article explores the articulations of citizenship in subaltern politics in contemporary India. I flesh out this argument through a detailed analysis of Adivasi mobilization in western Madhya Pradesh, India. My analysis shows how the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, a local social movement in the region, democratized local state-society relations by appropriating basic democratic idioms and turning these against local state personnel and the violent…
Afterword: Whither Hindu nationalism and its others
India’s pandemic: Spectacle, social murder and authoritarian politics in a lockdown nation
This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India’s Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country’s devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed…
Passages from Marxism to Postcolonialism: A Comment on Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
The 2013 publication of Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has reignited debates over the relative merits and demerits of Marxism and postcolonialism. This article reviews the debate and raises some critical questions about Chibber's engagement with questions pertaining to universalism and capitalist development. Focusing on Chibber's critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, the article contends th…
Social Movements Research and the ‘Movement of Movements’: Studying Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation
This article explores the state of research on the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation. Starting from a general consideration of the significance of the movement and the difficulties inherent in studying it, it discusses the literature on the movement from within social movement studies, and argues that the response from social movement researchers falls short of what could be expected in terms of adequacy to the movement and…
On New Social Movements and ‘The Reinvention of India’
The focal point of this article is the role of new social movements in the process which has been denoted as ‘the reinvention of India’, and in particular, the way in which the politics of these movements is analysed and represented in academic perspectives. Two areas form the focus of the discussion: firstly, the assertion that India's NSMs represent voices of ‘otherness’ emanating from beyond the postcolonial development project and articulatin…
Political Economy, Social Movements and State Power: A Marxian Perspective on Two Decades of Resistance to the Narmada Dam Projects
In this article, I put forward a Marxian analysis of the conflict over dam-building on the Narmada River in central and western India, which seeks to bring out how in this specific conflict it is possible to discern the workings of the master change processes that have moulded the Indian trajectory of postcolonial capitalist development. I start by showing how the concrete case of dispossession in the Narmada Valley is expressive of how the devel…
The authors and the actors of their own drama: Towards a Marxist theory of social movements
Marxism is a body of theory that emanated from and was crafted for social movements. Yet, paradoxically, it does not contain a theory that specifically explains the emergence, character and development of social movements. This article works towards the formulation of a Marxist theory of social movements. Grounded in Marx's philosophical anthropology, it argues for an ontological conception of social movements, and outlines a series of concepts f…
Social Movements in the Global South
Popular struggles in the global south suggest the need for the development of new and politically enabling categories of analysis, and new ways of understanding contemporary social movements. This boo
‘Not Suspended in Mid-Air’: Critical Reflections on Subaltern Encounters with the Indian State
Relations between subaltern groups and the state have received substantial attention in recent scholarly work on India's changing political economy.1 Here, I seek to focus on the arguments made in recent work by Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss. In contrast to perspectives which posit the state as existing for subaltern groups only as a negative source of oppression, and conceive of oppositional politics as deriving from cultures of subaltern ot…
Adivasis in and Against the State: Subaltern Politics and State Power in Contemporary India
The question of the state has come to occupy a central place in recent debates on subaltern politics in contemporary India. Against those critical voices that have claimed that the emancipation of subaltern groups can only proceed by challenging and moving beyond the modern Indian state, a range of scholars and commentators have asserted that it is precisely by seeking to harness the state that social movements can hope to advance their oppositio…
Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development , by Adam David Morton
What Would a Marxist Theory of Social Movements Look Like?
A Marxist Theory of Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements: An Introduction
Marxism is a body of theory crafted for social movements. This chapter suggests that the language of ‘class struggle’ translated into a language of ‘social movement’ with a Marxist accent. While contemporary social movement theories rightly stress the networked character of social movements, they pay less attention to their heterogeneity and internal debates. The book includes theoretical accounts of the relationship between Marxism and social mo…
Marxism and Social Movements
Marxism and Social Movements is the first sustained engagement between social movement theory and Marxist approaches to collective action. The chapters collected here, by leading figures in both fields, discuss the potential for a Marxist theory of social movements; explore the developmental processes and political tensions within movements; set the question in a long historical perspective; and analyse contemporary movements against neo-liberali…
Against the Current, From Below: Resisting Dispossession in the Narmada Valley, India
This article presents a comprehensive analysis of popular resistance to dam building in the Narmada Valley, India. Like Indian dam projects more generally, the Narmada projects are characterized by a distributional bias in favor of India's “dominant proprietary classes” and, it is argued, must be understood in terms of the political economy of postcolonial capitalism in India. The article then traces the emergence of popular resistance to disposs…
Adivasi Mobilization in Contemporary India: Democratizing the Local State
This article addresses the political aspects of the structural marginalization of Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) in India. Relating to critical debates about the changing nature of state-society relations in India, the article assesses the argument that the best way for social movements in India to advance their oppositional projects is to harness the state to their attempts to deepen democracy and advance subaltern emancipation. The trajectories of…
Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation
This article explores how, in the context of an unfolding process of neoliberalisation in India, new terrains of resistance are crystallising for subaltern groups seeking to contest the marginalising consequences of this process. We focus particularly on the emergence of India's ‘new rights agenda’ through a study of the making of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2013. Conc…
For a Historical Sociology of State–Society Relations in the Study of Subaltern Politics
This chapter presents a dense historical and theoretical discussion of how state-society relations have been theorized in both the Subaltern Studies project and in more recent Foucauldian studies of subaltern politics. The chapter argues that both perspectives fail, to fully appreciate the production of subaltern political agency and its containment in and through the state, and how subalterns use the full resources of ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’…
New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India
This title presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacies of Subaltern Studies and the evolving forms of hegemony and resistance in contemporary India. From the struggles of the urban poor in Gujarat to the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenf…
Subalterns and the State in theLongue Durée: Notes from "The Rebellious Century" in the Bhil Heartland
Focusing on recent debates over the ways in which subaltern groups engage with the state in India, the article proposes that it is imperative to historicise our conceptions of subaltern politics in India. More specifically, the argument is made that it is imperative to recognise that subaltern appropriations of the institutions and discourses of the state have a longer historical lineage than what is often proposed in critical work on popular res…
Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda
This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development i…
Globalizing Sociology: An Introduction
Much of the work that has gone into the making of this special issue has taken place in the context of South Africa, where the nation's universities have been sites of turmoil and protest for more than a year now.The origins of the protests that culminated in the FeesMustFall movement that swept across many of the country's campuses can be traced to a campaign that erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015.Led by a coalition of s…
Real, practical emancipation
Th is article explores the articulations of citizenship in subaltern politics in contemporary India. I flesh out this argument through a detailed analysis of Adivasi mobilization in western Madhya Pradesh, India. My analysis shows how the Adivasi Mukti Sangathan, a local social movement in the region, democratized local state-society relations by appropriating basic democratic idioms and turning these against local state personnel and the violent…
Passages from Marxism to Postcolonialism: A Comment on Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
The 2013 publication of Vivek Chibber's book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has reignited debates over the relative merits and demerits of Marxism and postcolonialism. This article reviews the debate and raises some critical questions about Chibber's engagement with questions pertaining to universalism and capitalist development. Focusing on Chibber's critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, the article contends th…
India’s Turn to Rights-Based Legislation (2004–2014): A Critical Review of the Literature
This article surveys the academic literature on rights-based legislation and critically discusses key findings and arguments that emerge from this literature. I conduct this survey and discussion in light of a wider understanding of the political economy of Indian democracy as resilient but limited in terms of substantial forms of redistribution and recognition in favour of subaltern groups. This contradiction has arguably become especially prono…
Rising powers, people rising: Neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries
The rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa – has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers of people to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These soc…
Mapping the World's Largest Democracy (1947-2017)
After seven decades as an independent democratic nation, India's social landscape remains marred by persistent contradictions and inequalities. As the country moves from celebrating 70 years of independence towards its seventeenth general election in 2019, this article sets out to survey what democracy has done to India over the past 70 years. How was Indian democracy established and how has it evolved? Why do people vote, and who do they vote fo…
Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations
Political science (35 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (17 works) · Political economy (15 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Subaltern (12 works) · Economics (11 works)