Alf Nilsen

Visiting Scholar

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is associate professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen. His work is concentrated in the field of critical development research, with a particular focus on social movements and the politics of popular resistance in the global South. Alf is the author of Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010) and co-author (with Laurence Cox) of We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto, 2014). He is also the co-editor of Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development, and Resistance (Palgrave, 2011), Marxism and Social Movements (Brill, 2013) and New Subaltern Politics: Rethinking Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Collected Work

Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India’s Bhil Heartland

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The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilized to reclaim citizenship, revealing how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalizing vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.

Participating Years

2016–2017

Consciousness and Revolution

The place of consciousness in radical theory and practice is a subject of significant dispute. Marx believed that much of what we construe as consciousness is “false,” a rationalization or an ideological reflex that stands between people and the “true material needs” of their life processes. Are consciousness and revolution mediated in the same ways today?

2012–2013

Uprisings: in History, in Process, in the Future

The last year has witnessed an extraordinary flowering of political and social protest across the globe. Each location of struggle, whether the revolutions sometimes called the “Arab Spring” or the vigorous demonstrations of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, provides important lessons in how we understand social change in the current conjuncture.What is the longue durée of such struggle? How do uprisings reconfigure the social? How are they represented and is representation itself an uprising?