The Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) invite you to a workshop on:
Law, Legitimacy, and Dispossession: Navigating Legal Mobilisation in New Delhi
Speaker:
Ms. Shatakshi Singh, PhD Candidate, Political Science, University of Santa Cruz
Tuesday, 28th October 2025, 3:45 PM IST onwards.
The event will be held online via Zoom. Please register to attend.
About the talk
In the urban landscape of the Global South, there is a pronounced policy focus on transforming cities into world-class metropolises. In India, efforts to combat domestic poverty have given rise to a political culture that seeks to invisibilise poverty through periodic slum eviction and clearance operations in urban areas. These demolitions not only lead to the immediate displacement of the ‘urban poor’ but also result in the devastating loss of livelihood, material well-being, and access to essential healthcare services for impoverished communities.
The law naturally assumes a pivotal role in the lives of the ‘urban poor’ in India, dictating their legal status and rights, and mediating their interactions with the state while also indexing land use and ownership claims. The inherent violence of urban development relies heavily on legal institutions to imbue the lives and built environments of the ‘urban poor’ with illegality, reducing their status to illegitimate citizens. Despite the disruptive nature of law in the lives of the Indian ‘urban poor,’ claim-making through legal channels is one of the key strategies employed by marginalised communities to articulate and assert their rights to secure housing, challenge state-enforced evictions, and access public services. This paradoxical faith placed in the law to mitigate the violence of neoliberal city-making projects, especially when the law serves as an agent in furthering these aspirations, presents a curious phenomenon in urban settings.
Within this context, this talk asks: How and why do the ‘urban poor’ in India mobilise the law, given that the law itself constructs the terms of their ‘illegality’ and perpetuates their marginalisation? When and under what conditions do the ‘urban poor’ elect to engage in legal mobilisation in addition to other forms of contention to resist dispossession? And how do the limitations of mobilising a law that is inherently antagonistic to their interests shape their strategies in these struggles?
About the speaker
Ms. Shatakshi Singh is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation, Resisting Displacement: Legal Mobilization and Claim-making in Contemporary India, examines the legal strategies, political negotiations, and grassroots mobilisations through which marginalised communities in Indian cities contest forced evictions and assert housing rights. Her research situates the everyday politics of displacement within broader debates on urban governance, law, and the restructuring of democratic space in contemporary India.
