Seminar: "Breaching the Fortress? Territoriality and Unruly Natures in India's Political Forest", by Asmita Kabra

Asmita Kabra, Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, India, will be giving a talk during her visit at ICTA-UAB.

Seminar: "Breaching the Fortress? Territoriality and Unruly Natures in India's Political Forest" 

Speaker: Asmita Kabra, Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. 

• Date: Monday 30th June, 2025
• Time: 2pm
• Venue: Sala Montseny (Room Z/022 / Z/023), ICTA-UAB and online
•  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81003143479?pwd=4wrs5aoVusGqIQ5gczJm8aKLl8ixkG.1

With the rise of Protected Area based biodiversity conservation, forced displacement of forest-dwelling and natural resource dependent communities has become a major driver of impoverishment on India's farm-forest frontiers. Conservation in the modern world has always been an exercise in territoriality - constantly negotiated, contingent, complex, dynamic, imperfect, and deeply performative. Building on Levien’s formulation of regimes of dispossession, I show that regimes of conservation dispossession in India have evolved differently from the regimes of dispossession for infrastructure development. Moreover, territoriality for conservation on the farm-forest frontier in the 21^st century is distinct from territoriality for extraction as it evolved from the colonial era till the end of the 20^th century. 

Based on nearly three decades of close engagement with a community of conservation refugees in a conservation landscape in central India, I show how agrarian and rural lives of conservation refugees become imbricated over time with the circuits of global capitalism. But does the afterlife of conservation induced dispossession necessarily follow the familiar trajectory of green grabbing and adverse incorporation? How do indigenous people and local communities (IPLCs) respond when their land is taken away for conservation, and their labour is rendered superfluous due to truncated agrarian transitions, as seen for instance in contemporary neoliberal India? Moreover, what happens to the project of biodiversity conservation in places vacated for ‘pristine’ nature through forced displacement? Does nature follow the script intended for it by the conservationist state, or does it throw up surprises through unruliness and inherent unknowability? And finally, what are the broader implications for conservation policy and practice in an increasingly precarious world? 

Asmita Kabra is a critical development practitioner and researcher, trained as an economist and specializing in political ecology. Her thematic expertise is in conservation and rural livelihoods, forced displacement, just transition, social impact assessment, agrarian change, and rural education. She has carried out social impact assessments, consultancies, and training programmes for governments and international agencies. She has nearly 30 years of teaching and research experience in India’s public university system. She taught at the School of Human Ecology, Ambedkar University Delhi (2010–2024) and at the Department of Economics, Ramjas College, University of Delhi (1995–2010). At present, she is an Associate Researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi.

She is the founder and President of the NGO Adharshila, and founder trustee of the NGO Samrakshan Trust. Both organizations work for sustainable and dignified livelihoods and education in the dryland forested areas in the Chambal region of Central India. She served as Managing Editor of Ecology, Economy and Society – the INSEE Journal during 2021–23. She is a regular reviewer for reputed international journals working in her thematic areas.