Sovereign Atonement

"Drawing on the experiences in the former border enclaves of India inside Bangladesh, Sovereign Atonement provides a rich ethnographic reading of the role of the state and the sovereign in excluding and including the same population and spaces within its mandate. It focuses on the aspects of (non-)citizenship, sovereign exclusion and resistance, territory, nationalism, land and property relations, rules of governance, and (post-colonial) state-making in Bangladesh. It demonstrates that enclaves remain key locations to (re)think sovereign violence. It focuses on the crucial moment of enclave exchange in 2015 and subsequent periods when numerous acts of sovereign in/exclusion and production of legible state spaces were at their peak. The unique temporality of the work allows glimpses into a rare contrast of experiences of "bare lives" residing in a "state of exception." Through its analysis, the book emerges not only as a temporal analysis of sovereignty and citizenship, but also as a lens to explain why and how the sovereign chose a specific category of citizens over others for extraordinary treatments, both in projecting violence and in extending exceptional privileges. The book addresses territorial exchange, sovereign rule, and state-making in the border enclaves by crossing boundaries between geography, anthropology, sociology, and area studies"--