Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South

This edited volume develops a theoretical framework—what we call urban regimes of dispossession—for understanding how urban actors organize dispossession and govern the urban dispossessed, how the urban dispossessed arrange, experience and resist dispossession, and how urban dispossession contributes to creating/expanding capitalist systems or transforming urban societies in the global south. The book's main arguments are built on a survey of the nearly two-hundred-year history of global dispossession studies and solid empirical evidence from three continents—Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and seven countries— Bangladesh, Brazil, Honduras, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Uganda. Eighteen scholars bring diverse perspectives and realities on urban dispossession, which will appeal to students, scholars, planners, and practitioners across various social scientific disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, urban studies, political economy, international relations, political science, economics, gender studies, and geography.

Contributors are: Shapan Adnan, Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior, Fred Bidandi, David L. Brunsma, Tarcyla Fidalgo Ribeiro, Lakshmi Jahnavi, Marie Kolling, Ana Maria Kumarasamy, Barbara Lipietz, Lipon Mondal, Adrian Murray, John Nagle, Victor Udemezue Onyebueke, Taísa Sanches, Karen Spring, Susan Spronk, Luanda Vannuchi and Julian Walker.

Lipon Mondal, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Dhaka. He has published nearly a dozen articles in top-notch journals, including Urban Studies, the Journal of World-Systems Research, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. His research focuses on global political economy, world-systems analyses, urban sociology, labour control, and sociological theory.

David L. Brunsma, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. He was founding co-Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and is founding co-Editor of the book series by the same name at University of Georgia Press. He studies race, racism, whiteness, and racialization.

"Since the early writings of Marx and Engels, scholars have analyzed capitalism’s dispossessing tendencies. As we enter an era of elite revanchism and state gangsterism at the commanding heights of world capitalism, understanding the causes of dispossession and the emergent politics of the dispossessed has become more urgent. Mondal and Brunsma’s Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South sheds light on these dynamics through an impressive synthesis of 200 years of scholarly writing, the development of a novel theoretical framework of urban dispossession regimes, and case studies from leading experts on urban livelihoods in South and West Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. Collectively, this volume highlights the social forces driving the advanced marginality of the world’s urban poor, while drawing attention to an emergent subaltern politics of urban repossession and resistance in the 21st century." — Phillip A. Hough, Florida Atlantic University, USA. Author of At the Margins of the Global Market: Making Commodities, Workers, and Crisis in Rural Colombia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Comparative Sociology
"This book extends the theoretical debates on regimes of dispossession to the urban realm in the global south, broadening the scholarship on a subject that has received relatively more attention in agrarian contexts. The work draws on a variety of illuminating case studies that examine how the dispossessed experience and resist dispossession in cities. I urge scholars and activists concerned with these themes to read this timely and valuable volume." — Daniel Bin, Associate Professor of Social Sciences, University of Brasilia, Brazil. Author of Capitalist Dispossessions: Redistribution and Capital Expansion in Contemporary Brazil (Routledge, 2025)
"Much of the violence and instability in underdeveloped nations comes from dispossessing the land of the poor. Urban Regimes of Dispossession in the Global South tells you everything you need to know about this essential phenomenon: The case studies are powerful. The Beirut chapter alone is worth the price of the whole book." — Samuel Cohn, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University, USA. Author of All Societies Die: How to Keep Hope Alive (Cornell University Press, 2021)