The National Law School of India University is organising a public lecture on ‘Temporary Lives: Law, Ruination, And The Right To Dwell In Lagos’ by Daniel E. Agbiboa, John & Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University on January 12, 2026.

Temporary Lives: Law, Ruination, And The Right To Dwell In Lagos

Across the Global South, urban eviction is increasingly justified in the language of climate adaptation, risk management, and development. Drawing on Agbiboa’s book-in-progress, ‘Dredged Lives: Futures and Foreclosures in an African City,’ this talk examines how such rationales operate in Lagos, Nigeria, where waterfront communities are routinely demolished in the name of  environmental safety, urban renewal, or megacity ambition. Agbiboa argues that these clearances are not failures of governance but deliberate techniques of rule. They take the form of self devouring growth and bureaucratic violence that convert land into speculative value by  rendering certain lives temporary.

Focussing on precarious waterfront communities, Agbiboa traces how law functions less as protection and more as performance. Court orders are ignored, notices are withheld, and legality is retroactively rewritten. In this context, eviction is not an exception but a governing rationality. Risk becomes an alibi, informality a weapon, and uncertainty itself a mode of control.

The talk also examines how residents insist on presence through staying put, rebuilding on rubble, mapping themselves into visibility, and crafting alternative plans for urban life, even when legal remedies fail. These practices constitute what Agbiboa calls ‘refusal without redemption,’ a politics oriented not toward final resolution but toward present-oriented survival and the  labor of carrying on regardless.

By bringing Lagos into conversation with broader debates on climate urbanism, law, displacement, and urban citizenship, the talk invites reflection on a pressing question for legal scholarship. What does justice look like when law itself governs through dispossession, and what forms of political life persist when redemption through law is no longer available?

About the Speaker

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Centre for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Prof. Agbiboa’s research focuses on the intersection of violence and order, urban governance, mobility and mobilisation, environmental politics, empire and African subjectivity. His works are grounded in discourse analysis, mobile ethnography, and a critical ethnography of the state. He is the author of They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Mobility, Mobilisation and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context; editor of Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos (Routledge, 2019); and co-editor of People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa (Langaa RPCIG).

He is the recipient of several prestigious (book and article) awards, including the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award given by the International Studies Association (ISA); the ISA Peace Best Book Award; finalist for both the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) Best Book Prize and the Global Development Studies (GDS) Best Book Award; the Politics and Gender Best Article Award given by editors of Politics and Gender journal (published by Cambridge University Press) and the Women, Gender and Politics Section of APSA; and the 2023 James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award (Honorable Mention) given by the Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2023, Professor Agbiboa received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award, given by the Urban and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his significant contributions to the study of urban politics. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, recipient of the Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and holder of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2024-2026). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, where he also serves as a Trustee.