Sovereign Atonement: (Non)citizenship, Territory, and State‐Making in Post‐Colonial South Asia

Abstract

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India, which were small pieces of one state entirely surrounded by the other, existed as extraterritorial spaces from 1947 until 2015. Since these spaces were subject to state violence but remained completely excluded from the protections provided by courts, police, and government, they have historically been understood as spaces of exception that contained bare lives. After the exchange of enclaves in 2015, the situation changed dramatically as the state assumed an active role in incorporating new lands and citizens. Such an active role resulted in unique privileges exclusively for the enclave residents understood here as sovereign atonement. Drawing on field research in Bangladesh, however, the paper argues that it would be misleading to capture sovereign atonement as an effort to correct the past violence of extraterritorial exclusion; instead it must be understood through the primacy of territory in state‐making in post‐colonial South Asia.

Guest Editorial

“…Several borderland scholars foreground the cartographic, political, material and emotional burden of being at the edge of national and political imaginaries. Roluahpuia (2022), Ziipao (2022), Ferdoush (2021), Kothiyal (2021), Gergan (2020), Ibrahim (2020), Baruah (2003, 2020), Gohain (2019), Kikon (2019), Cons (2016), McDuie-Ra (2008) and Van Schendel (2002) in their respective examinations of South Asian borderlands focus on the hierarchies of power between the centre and borderlands and question the emancipatory potential of the post-colonial state as it enforces its state-making process at its borderlands. Who belongs in the nation and is a legitimate citizen of the state is increasingly tied to notions of blood and soil as South Asian states take a territorial approach to questions of nationhood and citizenship to address their cartographic anxieties.…”