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Social Science Research Network
Indigeneity and Legal Pluralism in India: Claims, Histories, Meanings (Introduction)2015 •
Lund Studies in Sociology of Law 43, Lund University
Law, Resistance and Transformation: Social Movements and Legal Strategies in the Indian Narmada Struggle2013 •
Law, Resistance and Transformation is a socio-legal research study which discusses how activism and activists interact with or against the legal system. It is about how the law and social movements influence each other in various ways thereby generating new openings, or closures, for achieving social justice. Our theoretical discussion on this theme, which belongs to the social science field of socio-legal studies, builds on an empirical case study in which local village people in India fight for their survival and livelihood against the devastating effects on their lives from a mega-development project; The Narmada Dam system. Along the riverbanks of the Narmada River, one of India’s seven holy rivers, people have lived for generations with livelihoods and cultures connected to this river of life. Many belong to indigenous groups, the adiva- sis, the first peoples which came to the subcontinent we today call India, long before various migration flows and colonial projects brought other groups to the area. In particular we analyze the interaction between the movement NBA, Narmada Bachao Andolan, (Save the Narmada Movement), and the legal processes in the Narmada dam Supreme Court case in India. Along the Narmada River India’s largest dam project has been under construction with several hundred large dams being built since the 1980s. The dam has involved a multitude of actors at numerous levels (local, regional, national, global), engaged in a dynamic and highly contentious po- litical process of contestation for several decades. The struggles continue to evolve to this very day. In this text we do not aim to add yet another comprehensive political narrative to one of the most studied struggles in India. Instead we intend to map out the legal trajectories which gave rise to these socio-legal processes and try to understand the interactions between movement activism and the Indian legal system (legislation, judiciary, lawyers and so on). Our research contributes to earlier studies on the Narmada struggle but is based on a perspective that specifically studies what we call a socio-legal dynamic interaction. Methodologically this has been achieved through field studies via interviews with key informants positioned differently in relation to the socio-legal dynamics, e.g. activists, lawyers, politicians and judges.
The blog examines 'law struggles' (Sundar, 2011) - in which people struggle to maintain the rule of law and access justice- in the context of India's Amaravati city development project. The blog also reflects on the political force of the state in development politics and the situation of 'rightlessness' that arises from prolonging the 'air of legality' (Lund, 2023) of the existing laws under the presumed legality of new laws. While the blog highlights that people's capacity for legal consciousness to create solidarities becomes crucial in countering 'presumed legality' behind the state's violations, it also emphasises the contingent nature of effective legal mobilisation upon the state's intent and the interests of dominant elites who drive the legal struggles. Finally, this article argues for a critical understanding of 'law struggles' in conjunction with the state's development politics in post-liberalisation India.
Osgoode Hall Law Journal 49: 3 (2012)
Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently in India's Legal Discourse (winner of the 2014 UK Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize) [2012]The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law
Book Review: State law, dispute processing, and legal pluralism: unspoken dialogues from rural IndiaIn my review of Kokal's book, I show that Kokal approaches human rights questions by revisiting questions that are at the core of early legal anthropology – such as the nature of law and individual agency – all while building on the combined insights from the discipline. I argue that the biggest strength of the work is that its structure and style lend itself to addressing Indian lawyers as an audience, as Kokal communicates in clear words how human rights are already being vernacularised.
This article seeks to understand the contrarian impulses embedded in the historic Supreme Court judgement in the ‘battle for Niyamgiri’ that resulted in tribal gram sabhas rejecting the bauxite mining proposal of the Odisha state government and transnational corporation, Vedanta. It proposes that the importance of the Niyamgiri case lies in the legal representation of indigeneity that emerges as a counterpoint to automatic assumptions of developmentalism and cultural homogeneity. However, rather than seeing this as an epistemic or discursive break in the practice of law, it proposes that we see the case ‘jurisdictionally’, as a practice of representation that is enacted through technologies and devices of law. It is important to understand that constitutive actors—lawyers, judges, ministers, experts, tribals—within specific jurisdictional spaces can change the prudence and diction in law, beyond the internal necessity of rules underwritten by tradition or dominant discourse. It is through this lens that the article sees the Niyamgiri story as inaugurating a particular form of lawful relations for indigeneity—one that becomes a part of case law history and precedent. No matter how tenuous, precedents such as Niyamgiri underwrite the prospect of future iterations of indigeneity.
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 paper demonstrates how the local resistance to a land acquisition for the purpose of setting up a new automobile factory oscillated strategically back and forth between a multitude of sites of contestation. This strategic oscillation was, in turn, highly sensitive to the broader context in which the movement was carried out, and to the shifting terrain of the local and regional political landscape in particular. The attractiveness of invoking the language and institutions of law as part of their struggle therefore significantly depended on the attractiveness of other modalities of resistance at a given moment. In conclusion, the article uses the Singur case to critically interrogate and rethink the seminal work of Partha Chatterjee on political society and the politics of the governed in postcolonial India.
2019 •
2019 Progress in Applied Electrical Engineering (PAEE)
Comparative Study of Synthetic Test Circuits for Testing of MV and HV AC Circuit Breakers According to IEC Std. 622712019 •
Con-temporánea. Toda la Historia en el presente
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2021 •
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The aplication of teleradiology in dentomaxillofacial radiology2016 •
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Monstrous Bodies as Cultural Text The Grotesque, the Abject and the Embodied Difference in Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind2023 •
2021 •
Scientific Reports
Machine learning based predictors for COVID-19 disease severity2021 •
Journal of Porous Materials
Hierarchical porous carbon templated with silica spheres of a diameter of 14 nm from pure chitosan or a chitosan/ZnCl2 solution2018 •
WIKUACITYA: Jurnal Pengabdian Kepada Masyarakat
Pelatihan Kewirausahaan Bagi Ibu-Ibu Pemberdayaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga