Governing by Dispossession: Enemy Property and the Afterlives of the 1971 War in Pakistan

This talk traces how the category of enemy property migrated from a European imperial wartime technology to a postcolonial mode of governing minorities in South Asia. In this transition, the category collapsed the distinction between wartime enemies and religious communities deemed politically suspect, transforming into a powerful tool of minoritization.

Focusing on the Thar borderlands of Sindh in Pakistan, the talk examines how the ruins of properties officially designated as “enemy property” during the 1971 India-Pakistan war serve not only as material remains of conflict but also as enduring markers of dispossession through which local communities continue to navigate their political and social marginalization in the region.

Situating the postcolonial state’s practices of seizing and reallocating “enemy-owned” assets within a longer international legal genealogy, the talk shows how mechanisms first normalized during the First and Second World Wars were transplanted into British India and ultimately shaped the wartime bureaucratic imagination of postcolonial South Asian states.

Sadia Mahmood is an assistant professor at Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan, and a visiting scholar in the South Asia Program at Cornell University. Her work examines the making of postcolonial religious minorities and the histories of caste-oppressed communities in Pakistan. Her research draws on extensive fieldwork in the desert borderlands of Tharparkar and archival work on what was formerly East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

Her articles have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024), where she published “The Long Migration: Revisiting the Postcolonial Minority/Refugee Crisis and Governance in East Pakistan,” as well as in The Indian Economic & Social History Review (2023) and the Journal of Sindhi Studies (2022). She also has forthcoming work, including “Historical Lines in the Dunes: Tharparkar” in the Handbook of Sindhi Studies (Routledge, 2026). Sadia holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Arizona State University.