Sovereign Atonement

Md Azmeary Ferdoush is Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher based in the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland. Before taking up his position at the Karelian Institute, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Geography at the University of Oulu, Finland and explored the way regional changes and transformation processes take place in Arctic Finland and its adjacent regions due to state and supra-state organizations. He was awarded the prestigious East-West Center Graduate Degree Fellowship.

"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"--

Introduction: remnants, nations, and the sovereign; 1. Sovereign atonement; 2. From 'sensitive' to 'symbolic spaces'; 3. Land and citizenship as technologies of territory; 4. Everyday governance: ambiguity, accountability, and abundance; 5. Infrastructure, belonging, and the state; 6. Refusal and tolerance; Epilogue; Appendix: A note on methods; References.