Kenneth Bo Nielsen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 78655 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Kenneth Bo Nielsen |
| PRENOMES | Kenneth Bo |
| SOBRENOME | Nielsen |
| ASSINATURA | NIELSEN K B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6318-6039 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 268 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
‘From barren to beautiful’
This article analyses the discursive and material work that land fictions perform in processes of land commodification and dispossession for large-scale tourism projects in the Indian state of Goa. Following recent work that conceives of land fictions as legitimating narrative, legal and regulatory devises that partake in the production of land as a commodity, we identify four distinct land fictions at work on the Goan tourism frontier: the clean…
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
Goa
Wipe away the remaining signs
A deeper state? Anti-Christian violence in contemporary Chhattisgarh
Hindutva and anti-Christian violence in contemporary India
Gujarat Under Modi
The Political Outsider
Consumption, Sustainability and Everyday Life
This open access book explores everyday consumption patterns and how they are at the core of global and local sustainability challenges.
The politics of gifts and reciprocity in South–South Cooperation
Development economists have often argued that South–South flows of capital and aid are devoid of the conditionalities and hierarchies that define North–South flows of the same. Maussians and neo‐Maussians maintain that gifting—which allows for the ethos of reciprocity—leads to the formation of more equal international partnerships. This article focusses on India's development diplomacy. We unpack Indian cultural notions of ‘gifting’, which do not…
Bovine meat, authoritarian populism, and state contradictions in Modi's India
While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to “state contradictions,” we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist proj…
Dynastic dilemma in South Asia
This article contributes to the growing literature on political dynasticism in contemporary South Asia and shifts the focus from the much-debated national level dynasties to the usually ignored dynasties operating at subnational and regional levels. Analytically, it investigates the ‘moment’ of succession, conceptualised as the period when new heirs are actively enrolled in a dynastic formation. Such moments of succession can be perilous moments …
Consolidating a political dynasty
In this viewpoint article, we analyse the consolidation of Abhishek Banerjee as the future leader of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the dominant political party in West Bengal and one of the most influential opposition parties at the pan-Indian level. While the TMC has gone from strength to strength for over a decade under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee (who is also Abhishek's aunt), it has recently found itself in an unprecedented crisis, mire…
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…
Cultivating Democracy
Modi’s India
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…
Hindutva and communal polarization in Goa
In this viewpoint article, we analyse the heated controversy that unfolded in 2022 over who should be considered Goa’s patron saint: St. Francis Xavier or Bhagwan Parshuram. The controversy was sparked by a Hindu right organization named Hindu Raksha Maha Aghadi and its release of what it – with allusions to Vivek Agnihotri’s blockbuster ‘The Kashmir files’ – presented as ‘the Goa files’. These files ostensibly sought to bring to light the forced…
India’s Evolving Neoliberal Regime of Dispossession
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 …
Gods in the public sphere
This article proposes the idea of ‘political deification’ as a useful analytical concept to theorize the efficacy of religious icons, symbols, and objects in the political field of social movements and electoral politics in South Asia. This article uses the insight from various ethnographic studies to understand comparatively what political deification does, that is, what it is productive of. Some forms of political deification operate at the sca…
Citizenship in a Caste Polity
Jason Keith Fernandes’ meticulously researched and well-written monograph Citizenship in a Caste Polity is a study of the “citizenship experience of the Goan Catholics” (15). Building on a fine-gra
The Pandemic as a Rupture that Follows Rules
How a country responds to a rupture such as the COVID-19 pandemic can be revelatory of its governance. Governance entails not only the exercise but also the constitution of authority. The pandemic response thus presents a real-world disruption to verify or problematize some truisms about national governance and produce novel comparisons and insights. We present a comparative analysis across four established democratic nation-states. First, we ide…
India’s new coal geography
The advance of renewable energy around the world has kindled hopes that coal-based energy is on the way out. Recent data, however, make it clear that growing coal consumption in India coupled with its continued use in China keeps coal-based energy at 40 percent of the world’s heat and power generation. To address the consolidation of coal-based power in India, this article analyses an energy transition to, rather than away from, carbon-intensive …
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…
Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India
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…
The Politics of Caste in India's New Land Wars
In this article we introduce the special issue through framing the debate on the role of caste in India’s current land wars. We draw attention to how caste consistently mediates land transfers in present day India by pre-empting, undermining, or fuelling processes of social contestation, as well as the ways in which land claims in turn shape realigned or reimagined caste identities. Based on this, we make three main arguments. The first and most …
Agrarian and Other Histories
Agrarian and Other Histories is a festschrift in honour of the historian Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri was Professor of Economic and Social History at Calcutta University, where he taught for
Law andLarai
This article examines the dynamics of judicialisation and dejudicialisation of subaltern resistance in the context of a prolonged anti-land acquisition struggle in Singur in the Indian state of West Bengal. Taking its point of departure in a detailed, chronological ethnographic account of the Singur movement and its shifting engagement with the language and institutions of law, the article demonstrates how the local resistance to a land acquisiti…
Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition and Protest in West Bengal
Since 2006 Singur in West Bengal has been the centre of a controversy over land acquisition for a Tata Motors car manufacturing unit. A local rural movement challenging the land acquisition soon attracted the support of various activist groups and political parties from across India, and in late 2008 it succeeded in forcing Tata Motors to abandon Singur. This article uses the Singur controversy as a prism on the contested and contentious nature o…
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
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 …
Agrarian crossroads
Aspirations bring different versions of the future into the present. This introductory essay asks what we can learn by attending to the myriad ways in which rural subjects and collectivities articulate and institutionalise aspirations. We argue that aspirations are conditioned by constellations of power, which shape what can be done and what can be imagined. These visions of alternative futures can be either affirmative or transformative, but wil…
Orchestrating Anti-Dispossession Politics
This article uses the concepts of orchestration and spectacle to analyse the work of leaders of an anti-dispossession movement in rural West Bengal. It examines what being a movement leader entails and argues for the importance of connections and social relations in the production of both movement leadership and movement spectacles. By introducing a Dalit perspective on a movement that was otherwise led by the local middle-caste peasantry, the ar…
The regional identity politics of India's new land wars
India has over the recent decade witnessed a spate of land transfers as Special Economic Zones, extractive industries, or real estate dispossess farmers, land owners, and indigenous groups of their land. As a result, struggles over land have emerged with force in many locations, almost across India. Yet while the political economy and legal aspects of India's new 'land wars' are well documented, the discourses and identities mobilised against lar…
An activist can't become a politician’
This article explores the ambiguity inherent in the relationship between social activism and politics in West Bengal. I use a detailed account of the career of singer–activist turned politician Kabir Suman to examine the activist's view of himself and of politics, as well of how the porous boundary between activism and politics is both blurred and crossable. The fact that activists possess a kind of political capital useful within the framework o…
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…
The rise and fall of the ‘people's car’
When the Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors launched its new ‘people's car’ in 2008 it was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India. Yet seven years after the launch, the car has barely made an impact on the Indian car market and is widely regarded as a failure. This article offers a detailed study of the rise and fall of India's ‘people's car’. Based on a mapping of the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries th…
India’s new coal geography
The advance of renewable energy around the world has kindled hopes that coal-based energy is on the way out. Recent data, however, make it clear that growing coal consumption in India coupled with its continued use in China keeps coal-based energy at 40 percent of the world’s heat and power generation. To address the consolidation of coal-based power in India, this article analyses an energy transition to, rather than away from, carbon-intensive …
Wipe away the remaining signs
Compounding aspirations
This article introduces compounding aspirations as a key concept for interrogating complex and contradictory rural transformations in India. We argue that compounding aspirations are central to the conjunctural grounding of hegemonic processes of neoliberalisation in lived experience. Taking such aspirations as constitutive elements to hegemonic processes, we question prevailing perspectives on rural transformations in India as we speak to emergi…
Land use planning, dispossession and contestation in Goa, India
This article seeks to understand the role of land use planning in India's neoliberal regime of dispossession. Analyzing the relationship between planning and land dispossession in the state of Goa, we view planning processes and documents as constitutive parts of state-specific regimes of dispossession. We argue that planning in Goa emerges as a terrain of struggle between a state-capital nexus seeking to dispossess and convert land, and an organ…
Political Dynasticism
Political dynasticism is a persuasive phenomenon in South Asia. Yet, while political dynasticism has received ample attention at the national level, it has been almost systematically overlooked at the regional and local levels. In this article, we argue that political dynasticism at the local level is driven by conditions that are in crucial ways different from those that animate national politics. We use case studies and insights from the availa…
Dream zones
Jamie Cross has written a wonderful monograph on India's Special Economic Zones (SEZ). Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh – carried out over a period of ma
Hindutva and anti-Christian violence in contemporary India
Staying Cool, Looking Good, Moving Around
The nature of global development has changed substantially over the past three decades in step with the intensified globalisation of capitalism and its imperatives of growth and expanding consumption. Most significant is the ongoing shift in the balance of the global economy towards the South in general and the East in particular. As the ‘Rise of the South’ materialises, a number of emerging economies are moving beyond their roles as factories of…
Unclean Slates
This article interrogates the discourse of ‘greenfield development’ in contemporary India with special reference to the development of a greenfield airport in Goa. By unpacking the conflictual process between carrying out and challenging environmental impact assessments (EIAs) in connection with large-scale infrastructure projects, the article analyses the EIA process as one that simultaneously induces the articulation and territorialisation of t…
A deeper state? Anti-Christian violence in contemporary Chhattisgarh
Dynastic dilemma in South Asia
This article contributes to the growing literature on political dynasticism in contemporary South Asia and shifts the focus from the much-debated national level dynasties to the usually ignored dynasties operating at subnational and regional levels. Analytically, it investigates the ‘moment’ of succession, conceptualised as the period when new heirs are actively enrolled in a dynastic formation. Such moments of succession can be perilous moments …
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…
Farmers’ Use of the Courts in an Anti-Land Acquisition movement in India’S West Bengal
In 2006 Singur in West Bengal, India, was chosen as the location for a new far factory that was to produce what would ostensibly become the world’s cheapest car. To make way for the factory approximately 1,000 acres of farmland were expropriated by the state government. Farmers unwilling to relinquish their land refused to comply with the acquisition and organised politically to challenge the legitimacy, both moral and legal, of the government’s …
Four Narratives of a Social Movement in West Bengal
Singur in West Bengal's Hooghly district became a household name across India when in May 2006 the state's Left Front government (LFG) announced that it would be the future location for the Tata sm
En Ny Politisk Antropologi for Sydasien
JONATHAN SPENCER: Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: CUP 2007. ISBN 13:9780521777469 (pb). Pris: £15.99 LUCIA MICHELUTTI: The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India. London, New York & New Delhi: Routledge 2008. ISBN 978-0-415-46732-2 (hb). Pris: $95
Contesting India’s Development? Industrialisation, Land Acquisition and Protest in West Bengal
Since 2006 Singur in West Bengal has been the centre of a controversy over land acquisition for a Tata Motors car manufacturing unit. A local rural movement challenging the land acquisition soon attracted the support of various activist groups and political parties from across India, and in late 2008 it succeeded in forcing Tata Motors to abandon Singur. This article uses the Singur controversy as a prism on the contested and contentious nature o…
In Search of Development
West Bengal's Muslim minority are in many respects excluded from both the developmental and political processes in the state. Muslims score significantly lower on a range of socio-economic indicators compared to other sections of the population, and their representation in the political sphere is poor. However, recent years have witnessed an increasing mobilisation of Muslim organisations seeking to address and overcome this 'development deficit'…
An activist can't become a politician’
This article explores the ambiguity inherent in the relationship between social activism and politics in West Bengal. I use a detailed account of the career of singer–activist turned politician Kabir Suman to examine the activist's view of himself and of politics, as well of how the porous boundary between activism and politics is both blurred and crossable. The fact that activists possess a kind of political capital useful within the framework o…
Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India
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…
‘Community’ and the Politics of Caste, Class, and Representation in the Singur Movement, West Bengal
This chapter is concerned with what the civil-political society dichotomy does for the conceptualisation of ‘community’ in Subaltern Studies. While the early subalternists presumed pre-existing community formations and solidarities, later ones namely Partha Chatterjee argue that communities are ‘strategically created in the course of political action’. Notwithstanding this theoretical advancement over the earlier conception of community, Chatterj…
Dream zones
Jamie Cross has written a wonderful monograph on India's Special Economic Zones (SEZ). Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh – carried out over a period of ma
The rise and fall of the ‘people's car’
When the Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors launched its new ‘people's car’ in 2008 it was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India. Yet seven years after the launch, the car has barely made an impact on the Indian car market and is widely regarded as a failure. This article offers a detailed study of the rise and fall of India's ‘people's car’. Based on a mapping of the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries th…
Law andLarai
This article examines the dynamics of judicialisation and dejudicialisation of subaltern resistance in the context of a prolonged anti-land acquisition struggle in Singur in the Indian state of West Bengal. Taking its point of departure in a detailed, chronological ethnographic account of the Singur movement and its shifting engagement with the language and institutions of law, the article demonstrates how the local resistance to a land acquisiti…
Political economy of development in India
Staying Cool, Looking Good, Moving Around
The nature of global development has changed substantially over the past three decades in step with the intensified globalisation of capitalism and its imperatives of growth and expanding consumption. Most significant is the ongoing shift in the balance of the global economy towards the South in general and the East in particular. As the ‘Rise of the South’ materialises, a number of emerging economies are moving beyond their roles as factories of…
Living with Debt
The everyday politics of India's "land wars" in rural eastern India
The large-scale transfer of land from rural communities to private corporations has become a defining feature of India's development trajectory. These land transfers have given rise to a multitude of new "land wars" as dispossessed groups have struggled to retain their land. Yet while much has been written about the political economy of development that underpins this new form of dispossession, the ways in which those threatened with dispossessio…
Unclean Slates
This article interrogates the discourse of ‘greenfield development’ in contemporary India with special reference to the development of a greenfield airport in Goa. By unpacking the conflictual process between carrying out and challenging environmental impact assessments (EIAs) in connection with large-scale infrastructure projects, the article analyses the EIA process as one that simultaneously induces the articulation and territorialisation of t…
The regional identity politics of India's new land wars
India has over the recent decade witnessed a spate of land transfers as Special Economic Zones, extractive industries, or real estate dispossess farmers, land owners, and indigenous groups of their land. As a result, struggles over land have emerged with force in many locations, almost across India. Yet while the political economy and legal aspects of India's new 'land wars' are well documented, the discourses and identities mobilised against lar…
Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India
Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private secto…
Political Dynasticism
Political dynasticism is a persuasive phenomenon in South Asia. Yet, while political dynasticism has received ample attention at the national level, it has been almost systematically overlooked at the regional and local levels. In this article, we argue that political dynasticism at the local level is driven by conditions that are in crucial ways different from those that animate national politics. We use case studies and insights from the availa…
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…
Ground Down by Growth
What do Santhali migrant workers in the tea plantations of Kerala have in common with Dalit workers in Tamil Nadu’s chemical industry and with erstwhile nomadic agro-pastoralist Muslim Adivasis in
Indian Democracy
Hungry Nation
Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42(1), pp. 211–212
The Ethics of Staying
The Ethics of Staying brings Pakistan into the global debate on land rights and dispossession. It does this through a historically informed account of the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP), the Punjab T
Agrarian crossroads
Aspirations bring different versions of the future into the present. This introductory essay asks what we can learn by attending to the myriad ways in which rural subjects and collectivities articulate and institutionalise aspirations. We argue that aspirations are conditioned by constellations of power, which shape what can be done and what can be imagined. These visions of alternative futures can be either affirmative or transformative, but wil…
Political science (46 obras) · Sociology (42 obras) · Law (40 obras) · Politics (35 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Political economy (23 obras) · Geography (20 obras) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (18 obras) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (16 obras) · Economics (15 obras)