Dispossession, Resistance, and Political Futures Beyond the Nation-State

Open Session:

Across the world, projects of nation-state formation have relied upon processes of dispossession, territorial enclosure, racialization, gendered violence, forced settlement and displacement, bordering, and the regulation of mobility. Often justified through the language of development, citizenship, security, national unity, and even decolonization, these processes have produced political and social outsiders among Indigenous peoples, nomadic communities, racialized minorities, migrants, stateless populations, and others deemed incompatible with dominant national imaginaries.

This session brings together scholars examining the interconnected themes of dispossession, resistance, and alternative political futures. We invite contributions that explore historical and contemporary forms of state violence associated with settler colonialism, postcolonial state formation, nationalism, citizenship-making, territorial governance, and border regimes. Particular attention will be given to experiences of statelessness, denationalization, displacement, land dispossession, forced settlement, and other forms of exclusion and marginalization.

At the same time, the session seeks to move beyond narratives of victimization by foregrounding practices of resistance, refusal, survival, and political imagination. How do communities reckon with histories of dispossession? What forms of memory, knowledge, solidarity, and collective action emerge in response to state violence and exclusion? How do Indigenous, nomadic, stateless, migrant, gendered, and racialized populations articulate alternative understandings of belonging, mobility, sovereignty, rights, and political community beyond the bounded politics of the nation-state?

By centering perspectives often marginalized within mainstream sociological and political theory, this session contributes to debates on racism, nationalism, indigeneity, migration, decolonization, and global justice while exploring possibilities for political futures beyond state-centered frameworks of rights, citizenship, and justice.