Land Dispossession, Environmental Assessments, and the Politics of Inditement in Western India

Land dispossession and environmental destruction have assumed unprecedented urgency in India in recent years. Driven by the neoliberalisation of the Indian state and economy since the mid-1980s, large tracts of land (and the resources attached to them) have increasingly been “made available” to private investors within mining, real estate, and infrastructure development in particular. The literature on land dispossession in India as well as elsewhere has mapped the flexible repertoire of both coercive and consensual measures that state agencies and corporate actors can draw on to make land available to private capital, as well as the range of specific actors, mechanisms and imaginaries that work to facilitate land dispossession – including the police, security guards and coercive evictions; powerful politicians and investors; small-time land brokers and petty officials in control of land records; and the systematic manipulation of information, to list but some.

The Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo invites to this hybrid talk with Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Associate Professor at the Department investigating land dispossession, environmental assessments and the politics of inditment in Western India. The talk will be held as a hybrid event, and you’re invited to join either in person or online.

Find out more information on the event and register here.