Scholar Debaditya Bhattacharya (Delhi) discusses the current political conjuncture in India as a shift from the carceral to the custodial state, the crackdown on Kashmiri students, and the role of the University. Part of the research project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism”, facilitated by the International Consortium of Critical Theoy Programs and the FU Berlin, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation.

In the second episode of our new series “Dispatches of Authoritarianism”, our project member Gisela Catanzaro lays out the differences between the chainsaw authoritarianism of Milei, which baths itself in the oceanic feeling of the brutal limitlessness of chaos, and authoritarian movements in the “Global North” that are centred around bordering what is conceived as homogenous national space. Confronted with such a landscape, the task of critical thinking is located in the concrete analysis of the cracks of locally specific authoritarianisms, which are never as omnipotent nor as arbitrary as they present themselves.