At the Crossroads of Rights: Forest Struggles and Human Rights in Postcolonial India

This book demonstrates synergies and distils hard-earned lessons of human and forest rights struggles to inform the ongoing debates on environmental human rights. It highlights the ongoing struggles of the communities in postcolonial India that are confronted with the most brutal and unprecedented assault on their economic and sociocultural rights – often led by the political establishment.

The contributions in this edited volume present multiple narratives of these struggles, theoretical inquiries into a diversity of political imaginations, and the intertwined changes in the legal and biophysical landscapes. These contributions speak to some of the most important contemporary debates within the human rights community that stands in the crossroads with rights of Indigenous Peoples and other members of subaltern groups.

This volume will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in human rights politics, power, forest governance, and environmental movements in postcolonial India.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

Rahul Ranjan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of International Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. He is working on the Riverine Rights project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Prior to this, he worked as the Social Media Coordinator at the Human Rights Research Network in London. He was awarded his PhD in 2020 from the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK.