"Stateless" yet resilient

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces from 1947 until 2015, where enclave residents lived as a de facto ‘stateless’ population. Scholars have applied Agambenian framework of sovereign exclusion and bare lives to understand such abandonment. Analysing a transnational enclave exchange movement led by the former enclave residents, I argue that such a framework often loses sight of the nuances of daily life, especially when it comes to conceptualizing the resilience of a ‘stateless’ population. Based on fourteen-month ethnographic fieldwork, I thus offer a narrative of a resilient borderland population. In so doing, I propose the idea of acts of refusal and demonstrate that everyday practices of refusal play a significant role in resilience. Finally,…