Professor Nikita Sud

About

Professor Nikita Sud’s research focuses on the politics of global development, the neo-liberal transformation of postcolonial states and governance, and the political sociology, political economy, and ecology of contemporary India.

She has written extensively on the Indian state, in particular, its engagement with development as an idea and in practice; its interaction with minorities based on gender, caste and religion; and the reinvention rather than recession of this entity under economic liberalisation. This long-term research resulted in her book Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat (Oxford University Press, 2012), which was widely reviewed.

More recently, Professor Sud studied the socially entangled life of land. In research conducted over more than a decade in west, east and south India, she explored ideas and theories of land. The latter were put in conversation with processes of land-making in relation to state-, politics- and market-making. Alongside a number of publications in geography, environment, development studies, and Agrarian studies journals, this research is encapsulated in the monograph The Making of Land and The Making of India (Oxford University Press, 2021).

In future research, Professor Sud intends to delve into development theory, especially the changing meanings of the Global South. She is also initiating comparative research on the intersections of modernity, democracy and anti-democracy in contexts of environmental destruction and global climate change. An iteration of this work on ‘authoritarian environments’ is available in her 2022 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia.