Dispossession, Border and Exception in South Asia: An Introduction

Dispossession can be examined from various vantage points across disciplines. Dispossession is a condition that overturns self-sufficiency by forcing individuals and communities to be dependent. The dependency remains on a "mode of governance and a legal regime that confers and sustains those rights” (Butler 2013, 4). Being dispossessed indicate that the subjects are disowned and degraded by normalising powers active in the society, where the subjects are differentiated. The differentiation is manifested in varied conceptions of development and under-development, of dislocated and "counter-hegemonic subjects." This epistemic distinctions remains the basis for spaces of border formation. However, dispossession is a layered activity that involves multiple actors. It is imperative to unpack layers of dispossession to unravel complex border formation. Thus taking dispossession as the central category of analysis, the contributors in the special issue have examined the complex and layered relationship between dispossession and (b)ordering processes to demonstrate overlapping dominations and subjugations: at (in)security, psycho-social, cultural, political, and economic realms. It attempts to unravel mechanisms of contentious politics of dispossession and the “narratives of encounters” of collective imaginations within a relational framework. In the process, it tries to unfold historical processes and political dynamics of exclusion that constitutes internal and external border practices in acts of dispossession.