Eviction as Frontier Territorial Governance: Democratic Sovereignty and Spatial Precarity in Assam, India

Abstract

This article conceptualises eviction as a territorial mechanism through which democratic states govern ambiguous frontier landscapes. While
eviction is often interpreted as an administrative response to illegality or environmental degradation, the paper argues that it functions as a
spatial practice that periodically reasserts state authority, materialises internal boundaries and produces conditions of spatial precarity. The
analysis draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted in and around the Burhachapori Wildlife Sanctuary in Assam, Northeast India, combining
semi-structured interviews with evicted households, local intermediaries and state officials with documentary and discourse analysis of eviction
policies and conservation narratives. The findings reveal an oscillatory governance pattern characterised by prolonged administrative tolerance
followed by abrupt securitised enforcement. Settlements that gradually consolidated through cultivation and everyday engagement with state
institutions were subsequently reclassified as encroachments under conservation and land-legality frameworks. Despite possessing
documentary markers of citizenship, residents were rendered territorially removable through spatial reclassification. The article demonstrates
how eviction operates simultaneously as frontier territorialisation, internal bordering and eco-territorial legitimation. It argues that in politically
sensitive frontier regions democratic sovereignty is enacted less through stable territorial incorporation than through episodic interventions
that reorder land and belonging while sustaining administrative flexibility.