Skip to content
Yale Architecture YSoA
Search

Student Work

Student Work

All images
Filter by
All Programs
P.h.D.M.E.D.M.Arch. IIM.Arch I
Black and white photo of elevational blueprints of a house.
White book scans on a black background. From left to right it shows back cover, spine, and front cover. Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India. Book Cover. Graphic Design by Kaming Lee (Yale MFA).
Exhibition View Through Museum Window
A stack of three blue books with the title of the thesis "Unsettling Climate" its cover.
Core 4 Project
1
Once  Upon A Time in Gollywood
Points screenshot
Independence / Dependence
1
1.JPG
1
West Haven Waterfront Birth Center
01 thesis statement
Yuqing serena 0006 00
Water, Women, & Wellness
Environmental Awareness Center
230105 coolidge sketch
01
Post 10
Collapsed Landscapes by Erin Bascom
01
The Motherland Maternity Care Center
1 bldg final perspective front   12 (1)
Next Page
Loading in progress
Yale Architecture
Search
Yale Architecture
Search
  • Academics
    • Overview
    • M.Arch I
    • M.Arch II
    • M.E.D.
    • Ph.D.
    • Joint-degree Programs
    • Undergraduate Studies
    • The Jim Vlock First Year Building Project
    • Student Travel
    • Awards and Fellowships
    • Explore all Courses
  • Admissions
    • Overview
    • Requirements
    • Tuition and Fees
    • Financial Aid
    • International Students
  • Calendar
    • Events
    • Academic Calendar
    • Exhibitions
  • Publications
    • Overview
    • Perspecta
    • Retrospecta
    • Constructs
    • Books
  • About the School
    • Overview
    • History and Objectives
    • News
    • Tribal Lands Acknowledgement
    • Yale Urban Design Workshop
    • Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture
    • Fabrication Labs
    • Advanced Technology
    • Staff
    • Visiting
    • Contact
  • Faculty
    • Explore all Faculty
    • Endowed Professorships
  • Students
    • Student Affairs
    • Recent Graduates
    • Student Work
    • Student Groups
    • Career Development
  • Alumni
    • Overview
  • All Images
  • Forms and Resources
  • Make a Gift
  • School Policies
  • Jobs at YSoA
  • Accreditation Information
Yale logo
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Belonging at Yale
  • Accessibility
  • Land Acknowledgement
  • Public Safety
  • Colophon
  • Yale University
Loading in progress

Student Work

White book scans on a black background. From left to right it shows back cover, spine, and front cover. Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India. Book Cover. Graphic Design by Kaming Lee (Yale MFA).
Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India. Book Cover. Graphic Design by Kaming Lee (Yale MFA).
Spreads of the interior of the book with a scattering of colored photos.
MED Thesis Book Spreads.
Interior spreads of the book with colored images and drawn diagrams.
MED Thesis Book Spreads.
Overhead image of a detention center in India.
The Goalpara Detention Center, Assam, India. Image by Prashanth Vishvanathan. Bloomberg.
Image looking down a long black metal fence with barbed wire at the top.
The India-Bangladesh Border Fence. Image by the Author.
1∕5

Title

Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India

Authors
Samarth Vachhrajani

Course
Independent M.E.D. Research

Project Description

    Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India studies the spatial and legal instruments through which Hindu Nationalism and its political front, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), operates in Northeast India. It documents the means through which authoritarian power is introduced into a democratic structure of governance. Emphasizing the role of architecture and spatial knowledge, this thesis attends to how the violence of disenfranchisement and dispossession is legitimized under the force of law.

    Chapter 1, entitled ‘Legislating Containment,’ turns to how the legal instrument of citizenship and the conception of Indian nationhood was fundamentally reformed by introducing a legislative loophole. It studies the mechanism of manufacturing illegal citizens and incarcerating them at the Goalpara detention center and multi-purpose criminal jails in the northeastern state of Assam. This chapter attends to how, instead of an exception, clearly defined laws have authorized the violence of indefinite detention for Bengali Muslims. Chapter 2, ‘Discontinuous Border,’ traces the intermittent fences along the India-Bangladesh border. It explains how a discontinuous border fence allows the positioning of the military with shoot-at-sight orders and proliferates the infrastructures for the limestone extraction and cement manufacturing industry. It emphasizes how the logic of infrastructural development is co-opted to make borders inseparable from circulations of global economic power and capital and finance ethnonationalist motives. Chapter 3, entitled ‘Conservation Nationalism’ looks at the Kaziranga National Park, where the global efforts of conserving the One-horned Rhinoceros and emergent environmentalism are repackaged with ideas of national heritage and religious patriotism to evict Bengali Muslim migrants that dwell in the forest margins. This chapter examines how forest land rights are predicated on spatial knowledge of satellite image resolutions to expand national park boundaries and carry out eviction drives.

    In all three cases, this thesis unfolds how spatial and legal instruments introduce an illiberal form of rule within the existing liberal democratic structure of governance. It documents how violence is legally authorized and spatially delivered in Northeast India.


Related items

Courses

Independent M.E.D. Research

Student Work

Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India

White book scans on a black background. From left to right it shows back cover, spine, and front cover. Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India. Book Cover. Graphic Design by Kaming Lee (Yale MFA).
Students

Samarth Vachhrajani