@phdthesis{deff273a-7ad1-4eb5-915c-22fbb5b9636e,
  abstract     = {{This thesis interrogates the contemporary unmaking of civil society in India through the analytic of civic governmentality, arguing that the crisis of civic space is not merely a story of repression but of the deeper remaking of civic subjectivity under conditions of authoritarian neoliberal rule. Against narratives that cast international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) as either heroic resistors or passive victims of state encroachment, the thesis demonstrates how they are increasingly governed through their own adaptive manoeuvres: practices of precaution, institutional self-censorship, managerial depoliticisation, and the internalisation of state rationalities. Civic space does not simply “shrink”, it is reconfigured through anticipatory modes of governance that compel INGOs to survive by becoming governable. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork and grounded in Foucauldian analytics, the study shows how regulatory, discursive, and postcolonial governmental techniques operate less as coercive instruments than as subtle mechanisms that shape what civic actors recognise as possible, permissible, and prudent. These techniques inherit and reanimate long-standing postcolonial state rationalities in which suspicion, developmentalism, and national belonging are constituted as conditions of civic legitimacy. Within this terrain, compliance becomes culture: a political rationality sedimented into organisational routines and imaginaries. INGOs perform resilience less as a strategy of resistance but more as a modality of rule, reproducing the very constraints they seek to navigate. The thesis therefore, advances civic governmentality as a conceptual realignment of governmentality theory adequate to the postcolonial democratic present, where authoritarianism emerges incrementally from within liberal-democratic institutions. Yet, the thesis also traces the limits of this transformation. It argues that the erosion of political imagination (what is thinkable, sayable, actionable) constitutes the deepest violence of authoritarian neoliberalism. Recovering agency thus demands not a return to civil society as we have known it but an iconoclastic refusal of the images through which it is rendered governable. In this tension between adaptation and counter conduct lies the future of civic possibility.}},
  author       = {{Banerjee, Soumi}},
  isbn         = {{978-91-89604-82-7}},
  issn         = {{1650-3872}},
  keywords     = {{Governmentality; Postcolonial state; Shrinking civic space; Authoritarian neoliberalism; Political imagination; Governmentalitet; Postkolonial stat; Krympande civilt utrymme; Auktoritär nyliberalism; Politisk föreställningsförmåga}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  publisher    = {{Lunds universitet, Socialhögskolan}},
  school       = {{Lund University}},
  series       = {{LUND DISSERTATIONS IN SOCIAL WORK}},
  title        = {{Civic Governmentality and Its Discontents : Rethinking Agency, Resilience, and the Reconfiguration of INGOs in India}},
  url          = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/249938812/e-nailing_ex_Soumi.pdf}},
  volume       = {{74}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}