Record Detail

A ‘squatter’ in the global South is another word for a seemingly
incomprehensible heap of legal ambiguities, messy politics and abject poverty.
Squatter dwellers are typically immigrants from the countryside, who squat on
seized land and are caught in complex mazes of citizenship, labor and property
laws. They are suspended in what I call ‘juridical limbo’—a situation in which
overlapping legal identities and contradictory laws render individuals or entire
communities 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 complications
to their extralegal advantage. Using the case of two extraordinary land
conflicts in India’s most populous city—Calcutta—this paper contrasts the claimmaking
strategies of two squatter settlements, providing a rich ethnographic account
of their differential success in protecting their territory against eviction and of
navigating 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.