Permutations of a lie: fortress conservation and the (re)making of subjects in the global carceral archipelago

Abstract

This article is substantively based on an analysis of land documentation concerning the Indigenous communities of Madhupur Forest of Bangladesh, combined with fifty five interviews. We demonstrate that the Garos have suffered formal dispossession of their land rights, while retaining control of a substantial number of holdings, over a a timescale of forty years. This suggests that economic factors were not the main reason for the removal of their de jure rights as no-one has gained financially from this process. In order to explain why this was done, we turn to theories of the carceral state insofar as they bear on the racialisation of property and the making and remaking of subjects in a manner that is relational to dominant narratives and processes in the nation-building process.