This article examines the democratic decline of Bangladesh between 2009 and 2024 through the dual lenses of Niccol & ograve; Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. While recent scholarships on backsliding highlights institutional erosion and competitive authoritarianism, few studies explicitly frame these developments within early modern political theory. I argue that Bangladesh's trajectory reflects the systematic sacrifice of Machiavellian liberty, understood as institutional balance, pluralism, and civic virtue, in favor of a Hobbesian narrative of order rooted in stability, security, and development. Using process tracing and triangulating secondary sources, democracy indices, laws, and observer reports, the study identifies three phases of decline: the dismantling of electoral neutrality (2009-2014), consolidation of authoritarian governance under development discourse (2014-2018), and entrenchment of executive dominance culminating in mass upheaval (2019-2024). A Machiavellian reading underscores the hollowing of institutions and civic engagement, while a Hobbesian perspective illuminates how fear of unrest and promises of prosperity legitimized authoritarian measures. The synthesis demonstrates how regimes justify illiberalism by invoking security, yet over time this trade-off yields brittle rule vulnerable to popular revolt. The Bangladesh case highlights the enduring tension between liberty and order, offering comparative insights for analyzing democratic backsliding globally.
This paper presents a spatial biography of the Idu-Mishmi situated at the India-China borderscape. It explores how the traditionally managed ecosystem is getting transformed with the onset of newer agencies, and modifying the human and natural systems. Hunting and trade have been significant practices among the communities which connected the people residing on both sides of the border. However, the traditional multispecies interaction has been disrupted because of some fascinating chronicles: (a) Dibang valley became geopolitically significant, (b) emergence of border and state institutions, (c) transforming from soft border to hard border, (d) settlement of military cantonment and establishment of protected areas, and (e) infrastructure development has constructed multiple forms of prohibited areas and shaped the everyday lives. The borderscape got a drastic flip after the India-China War of 1962. Even after, the cultural landscape is getting colored largely as the securitized landscape. Hunters continue to operate and have informal interactions among themselves in the upper reaches of the Dibang Valley. What has been the ethnic cultural landscape got additional identity of being a sensitive borderscape and a biotic province. This study employs participatory rural appraisal (PRA) to understand how the 'biogeopolitics' helps the state to control and secure the sensitive border space.
The advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s in the West drastically transformed spatial relations, leading to the neoliberalisation of space across the globe. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this process-and the resulting 'neoliberalised spaces'-was disrupted, necessitating renegotiation. In this article, I explore the ongoing process of re-negotiating neoliberalised spaces in the post-pandemic era within the periphery of the Global South. Through an ethnographic case study of Bangladesh, I examine how the socioeconomic conditions following the pandemic have compelled actors in these spaces to re-enact boundaries, thereby repositioning their spatial existence. I argue that neoliberalised spaces in the Global South periphery are 'fractured spaces'-complex amalgamations of the region's colonial past and the ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Vandana Shiva's conceptualisation of nature's, sustenance and market economies, I propose the existence of two distinct spatial realms: 'globally implanted' and 'locally rooted'. I demonstrate how the former is embedded in neoliberal global capitalism, whereas the latter thrives within Bangladesh's sustenance economy. In conclusion, I argue that the dynamics of neoliberalised spaces in the Global South periphery in the post-pandemic era are characterised by a process of 'fragmented becoming'.
This article offers a postphenomenological reading of South Asian labour migration to the Gulf through Deepak Unnikrishnan's Temporary People. I argue that the novel theorises what I call visa flesh: a condition in which the migrant body is made legible, governable, and exploitable through the infrastructures of kafala - ID systems, camp routines, worksite technologies, transport, and digital communication. Bringing postphenomenology into dialogue with Judith Butler's account of politically distributed precarity and Brian Larkin's account of infrastructure as material and sensory form, the article shows that Gulf precarity cannot be reduced to wages, contracts, or legal status alone. It is also produced through everyday mediations that reorganise perception, movement, recognition, and exposure. Rather than using migration scholarship to validate fiction, the essay uses empirical work to frame the institutional conditions that Unnikrishnan's formal experimentation renders newly perceptible. Close reading of embodied, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations demonstrates how the novel makes infrastructural violence sensible at the level of rhythm, atmosphere, and bodily fragmentation.
The afterlife of Nepal's Hindu monarchy persists not as an institutional residue but as an affective force - resurfacing in chants, symbols, and populist imaginaries that seek to re-sacralise the secular state. This article examines the political resurgence of Hindu nationalism in post-2008 Nepal as a grammar of belonging that emerges precisely where democratic legitimacy is faltering. Rather than treating pro-monarchy mobilisations as episodic or nostalgic, it argues that they represent an affective reordering of sovereignty, one that fuses religious idioms with populist resentment. Drawing on recent rallies, political discourse, and symbolic invocations of sacred kingship, the article examines how the state becomes a site not only of governance but also of yearning - saturated with the promise of moral clarity and cultural restoration. The study, therefore, foregrounds the entanglement of memory, faith, and disenchantment to reframe Hindu nationalism in Nepal not as a return to the past, but as a mode of sacralising the present amid a democratic crisis.
This article offers an urban ecocritical reappraisal of Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008), situating the novel within the intersecting discourses of environmental humanities, postcolonial urbanism, and the Capitalocene. While existing scholarship has largely foregrounded the novel's sociopolitical critique - emphasizing themes of caste, corruption, and neoliberal subjectivity - this study uncovers the ecological substratum of Adiga's urban vision. By tracing Balram Halwai's journey from rural Laxmangarh (Bihar) to the congested corridors of Delhi and the glittering yet dysfunctional landscape of Gurgaon, the study stages a critique of India's post-liberalization urban trajectory. The narrative depicts urban space as marked by infrastructural disorder, atmospheric toxicity, and deep spatial inequalities. By situating Adiga's literary representation alongside environmental data on pollution, urban expansion, and ecological stress in the Delhi-NCR region, the study demonstrates how The White Tiger registers the uneven ecological consequences of India's post-liberalization development. The novel ultimately emerges as a critical environmental narrative that exposes the entanglement of capital, urban growth, and environmental precarity in contemporary India.
This study contends that maritime communities are uniquely positioned to inform and challenge our notions and subjectivities about the sea, seascapes and subalternity that are characterised by the continual interaction and reformation of human, non-human and more-than-human assemblages. The point of departure for this article is that, the sea is "not just & mldr;"- the sea is not just a necessity; the sea is not just a water body; the sea is not just a material; the sea is not just a metaphor; the sea is not just a social construction, and so on. It expands the manner in which communities connect with the sea. Secondly, this study uses ethnographic accounts to counter that sea is external; it foregrounds instead that the sea is fundamental to people's history, geography, culture and emotions. It unpacks the "deep involvements" indigenous communities have with land and sea- with their lives and the totalities around them characterised by the ever-changing synergies of nature and culture. Drawing on the lived experiences of the indigenous people of the Indian Sundarbans, who are ontological and culturally amphibian, this article explores the radically distinct and practice-oriented sensibilities that are critical to the discourse around understanding and addressing ecology related challenges.
This paper reads the April 2022 Jahangirpuri demolitions as a brutal act of domicide: the deliberate destruction of home as punishment, humiliation, and political theatre. It argues that "bulldozer politics" in India, which has intensified since 2020 and presents itself as an anti-encroachment effort, is a weaponized regime of collective punishment that converts municipal law into an alibi for violence on Muslims. Using the case study method, the paper theorises how violence, policing, and demolition operate together to turn Muslim dwellings into targets of sovereign vengeance and majoritarian rule. India's bulldozer politics also exposes the need to expand the scholarship on domicide beyond the categories of Extreme and Everyday Domicide. This binary does not fully capture how home is destroyed in 'peacetime' by a state that frames destruction as legality and discipline. To address this, the paper proposes Punitive Domicide as a sharper category for understanding the state's destruction of dwelling as an intentional assault on precarious criminalized lives. Understanding urban development laws in theories of punishment opens further possibilities of scholarship in various disciplines. In arguing for this conceptualization, this paper shows that bulldozers in contemporary India are not neutral machines of development, but symbols and instruments of punitive rule.
The Galwan Valley clash between Indian and Chinese troops in June 2020 is a tipping point in India-China ties, similar in magnitude to the 1962 India-China war. Although academic literature on India-China relations is gaining ground post the Galwan Valley clash, there is dearth of literature on India's balancing strategies vis-& agrave;-vis China after Galwan. This article makes a contribution to the existing literature by examining whether India is still pursuing evasive balancing vis-& agrave;-vis China after the Galwan Valley clash. It does so by borrowing Rajesh Rajagopalan's definition of evasive balancing. Prior to the Galwan Valley clash, India was pursuing evasive balancing because it was balancing internally and externally against China, but it was also reassuring China that it was not balancing against it by following five reassurance policies. This article highlights that post-Galwan, India has enhanced its internal and external balancing vis-& agrave;-vis China. With respect to reassurance towards China, the article illustrates that out of the five strands of the reassurance strategy pursued by India prior to Galwan, New Delhi is pursuing only two aspects of the reassurance strategy. Thus, India is no longer undertaking evasive balancing against China to the extent it pursued prior to Galwan.
