A ‘squatter’ in the global South is another word for a seeming lyincomprehensible heap of legal ambiguities, messy politics and abject poverty.Squatter dwellers are typically immigrants from the countryside, who squat onseized land and are caught in complex mazes of citizenship, labor and property aws. They are suspended in what I call ‘juridical limbo’—a situation in whichoverlapping legal identities and contradictory laws render individuals or entirecommunities into a state of semi-legal existence. Many squatters have fallen through the cracks of the legal arena and are vulnerable to being evicted without proper rehabilitation, but some of them have indeed learnt to use the law’s com-plications to their extralegal advantage. Using the case of two extraordinary landconflicts in India’s most populous city—Calcutta—this paper contrasts the claim-making strategies of two squatter settlements, providing a rich ethnographic accountof their differential success in protecting their territory against eviction and ofnavigating their semi-legal status. Alongside establishing this variation, this paper also interrogates the proximate causes of this variation and puts forth a theoretical framework that focuses on the legal relationship between the state and the urban poor.

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• In ‘Juridical Limbo’: Urban Governance and SubalternLegalities among Squatters in Calcutta, India