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.

The HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law at NLSIU is organising a talk on ‘Hidden Precarities: Debt and Embodied Risk in Urban Uttarakhand, India’ by Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan from Wellesley College, US, on January 8, 2026.

About the Speaker

Dr. Smitha Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College in the United States. She is the author most recently of Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (2022) and The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (with Cinzia D. Solari, 2023). An award-winning feminist sociologist focussed on questions of finance, development, and labour, Dr. Radhakrishnan is currently studying household debt and moneylending in the contexts of India, South Africa, and the United States.

About the Talk

How might the experiences of low wage workers in contemporary India clarify conceptualisations of precarity developed primarily in global North contexts? This paper departs from an employment-oriented understanding of precarity to center the bodies and narratives of men and women workers who take loans in order to make ends meet. Drawing from 188 interviews with low-wage workers in the highly financialised state of Uttarakhand, India, we conceptualise precarity as embodied risk. We identify a continuum of embodied risk resulting from a combination of formal and informal loans, ranging from mental strain to the loss of belongings to ill health or premature death. Leveraging a social reproduction framework sensitive to caste and gender, we find that workers experience intensified embodied risk when taking high-interest loans from private moneylenders to meet pressing expenses, a phenomenon known as distress financing. Our analysis first examines how informal and formal loans accessible to low wage workers put the bodies of workers on the line in different ways. Then, through a close examination of a subset of workers, we explore the key mechanisms through which borrowing intensifies embodied risk for some workers and their families more than others. Caste, gender, household composition, and migrant status, all intersect to shape embodied risk. This intersectional understanding of precarity draws attention to the constitutive links between moneylending, financialisation, and social reproduction in contemporary India. We call for both state-led and community-led efforts to shore up diverse forms of social protection.

In this week’s faculty seminar, Dr. Anindita Adhikari, Assistant Professor, Social Science, will be presenting her paper titled ‘Disputing the State: Redeeming rights though state-backed claim-making in India’ on December 24, 2025.

Abstract

There is considerable consensus amongst socio-legal scholars that for social rights to be realised the law must be pursued beyond courts, through local institutions and that local structures of claim-making, beyond litigation, are needed. However, accounts of how national rights regimes are embedded in and supported by local structures and actors and how the expanded institutional terrain of the state triggers rights claims, is not as well understood. This article focusses on a novel reform in India, called social audits, which are a set of legally backed forums and procedures that induce welfare-based claims and complaints. This article argues that these forums for claim-making have expanded the downward reach of the state and by taking on the costs of social rights mobilisation, have invited an unprecedented increase in formal claim-making. The article identifies the logics of state-backed claim making to explain how social rights can be claimed even in contexts with extreme social exclusion and patrimonial bureaucratic cultures. It provides valuable insights into the infrastructural support needed not just for vernacularising the law but to transform the vernacular of claim-making itself.

The Reliance Chair on Corporate Law and Governance at NLSIU organised a guest lecture on the ‘Role of Insurance in Merger and Acquisition Transactions’ by Adoksh Shastry, Partner, AZB & Partners on December 24, 2025.

Key Concepts

• Introduction to Warranty & Indemnity (W&I) insurance
• Role and use of W&I insurance in M&A transactions
• Basic terms and features of W&I insurance
• Typical structures around insurance deals and timelines
• Exclusions, inclusions and scope of W&I insurance
• Claims process and impact on clients in M&A transactions
• Case studies and transaction specific examples
• Tax insurance and its role in M&A transactions

About the Speaker

Mr. Adoksh Shastry is a Partner at AZB and Partners (Bengaluru Office), in the Corporate/ Mergers and Acquisitions practice group of the firm. With over a decade of experience with the firm and the team, his key practice areas include Capital Markets, Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity and Venture Capital, Regulatory & Securities, E-commerce & Retail, FinTech & Digital, Microfinance, etc.