Managing political space: authority, marginalised people’s agency and governance in West Bengal

Abstract

This paper investigates governance reform which aims to 'move the state' closer to people, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to two questions: how does political decentralisation affect the ways in

Territorialising control in urban West Bengal: Social clubs and everyday governance in the spaces between state and party

“…In acting as a supposed non-partisan force and an institutional voice, while also relying on personalised political connections in order to obtain benefits for the para , clubs become enrolled in the networks of patronage that shape access to the state in West Bengal (Williams and Nandigama, 2018). Some of the influence of clubs as authorities and intermediaries rests on their potential to act as vote banks.…”

“…Urban and political geographers in particular have giving increased attention to the multiple configurations of power and overlapping spaces of governance that characterise postcolonial cities (though not only them) (Schindler, 2014; Şenol, 2013; Truelove, 2019). In doing so, they have begun to problematise assumptions about who qualifies as a political agent (Kuss, 2019), to carefully examine ‘how rule [is] practiced and experienced’ (Williams and Nandigama, 2018: 9) and to recognise institutional complexity, highlighting that social institutions which may self-identify as non-political may still exercise power and wield public authority (Lund, 2006). In this paper, I follow and extend these arguments, analytically drawing on De Certeau’s (1984) Theory of Practice, to demonstrate how social institutions may draw on material and social practices that contribute to subject formation and the reproduction of territorialised authority.…”