Ruling the Margins

Prem Kumar Rajaram is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Hungary.  In his research, Prem Kumar Rajaram is particularly interested in questions of marginality and depoliticisation. His research has focused on the government of asylum-seekers, particularly those in detention in Europe and Australia, and on colonial histories of state making. He is particularly interested in the limits of politics, looking at individuals and groups excluded from political participation and seeing what their exclusion says about the nature of the political.

• Introduction 1. Ruling the Margins 2. Class and the Colonial City: The Production and Administration of Kuala Lumpur 3. Of Law and Land: Producing Peasants and Landlords in Bengal 4. Representing the Margins: Colonial Art and Photographs in the Service of Depoliticisation 5. Mapping Iraq: Publics, Experts, Politics 6. "The State Needs to Protect Itself": Acts of Citizenship by Asylum-seekers in Hungary 7. Spaces of Hope: Rethinking the Purposes of Citizenship

"It is common place these days to bemoan the depoliticization of governance in the West especially with regards to the neoliberal focus on "administration". Prem Kumar Rajaram resituates the genealogies of administrative government in the colonial world and in so doing sheds new light on its contemporary global manifestations. This book will be a challenging and rewarding read for all scholars presently concerned with the fate of the political."—Dr. Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University of London, UK