Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border

Re‐inhabiting no‐man's land: genealogies, political life and critical agendas

“…Zones of abandonment are constantly produced through intense discursive labour and the investment of physical means. Simultaneously, abandonment as a constitutive dimension of no‐man's lands produces new forms of political subjectivities and sources of mobilisation, as we have identified in the Palestinian deportees’ tent camp, and as others find among South African health activists (Comaroff ) or in the articulations of communal bonds in India–Bangladesh border enclaves (Cons ). Building on Marx and Foucault, Jane Comaroff (, 26–7) speaks of the prolific productiveness of abandonment, and the ways it has given rise to new forms of sociality and signification.…”

Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces

“…Worse, the bare life paradigm has the unfortunate effect of caricaturing the rich, complicated lives and ways of being of people in complex sensitive spaces, and screening out much of what they actually do . As our own ethnographic research has shown, border communities and camps for internally displaced people bear little resemblance to the notion of warehouses or trash dumps for passively suffering people that is so pervasive in the literature (Bauman ; Cons , ; Dunn , ). In fact, people in sensitive spaces do not merely passively await aid, but instead actively appropriate the world around them in an attempt to meet their needs and to rebuild coherent and meaningful lives under extremely difficult circumstances (see Lefebvre :231).…”

Impasse and Opportunity: Reframing Postcolonial Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border

“…Whatever the reason for the company's failure, the gap opened by Doyel was a business opportunity for local groups within the enclave seeking to establish new modes of territorial control. After the enclave opened in 1992, as I describe elsewhere (Cons 2013), a flood of new migrants moved in and purchased land from Hindu residents, many of whom were abandoning the enclave, at fire sale prices. These new migrants were known locally as Bhatiyas (outsiders), and though they remained politically marginal within Dahagram, they quickly emerged as central economic players, expanding existing holdings and experimenting with new strategies for capital accumulation.…”