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“Surplus Humanity" And The Margins Of Legality: Slums, Slumdogs, And Accumulation By Dispossession, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

Marooned on the outskirts of the law, more than one billion people worldwide live in urban slums and squatter settlements, mostly in the global South. Law, extra-legality, and illegality commingle in urban slums to produce spaces and subjects at the margins of legal orders and formal economies. Three enduring and inter-related features of capitalism-accumulation by dispossession, a reserve army of labor, and an informal sector of the economy-produce and sustain urban slums. The genesis and persistence of slums and slum-dwellers testify to the iron fist of the state working in concert with the hidden hand of the market in the …