Acknowledgements
This edited volume has been long in the making. The plan to work on this book began on a winter morning in 2019 when David Brunsma and Lipon Mondal held one of their weekly meetings at Frank’s Bar and Restaurant as part of Mondal’s dissertation work at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume’s idea of urban regimes of dispossession was sparked from Michael Levien’s idea of regimes of dispossession drawn on India’s realities of rural dispossession and Mondal’s work on political regimes of urban dispossession in postcolonial Bangladesh, 1947–2020. However, the idea in this book differs from both Levien’s and Mondal’s.
From day one of this project, Brunsma and Mondal worked together to develop the book proposal, contact publishers, secure a book contract, invite contributors, scrutinize the abstracts, finalize the authors, read the draft chapters, provide initial feedback, secure a peer reviewer per chapter, and put the chapters together into the book you now hold in your hands. Brunsma and Mondal also coauthored two chapters in the volume. Brunsma took an extra load to copyedit the entire volume before sending it to Brill. Both are grateful to each other for their contributions.
While this volume is Brunsma’s 12th co-edited book, Mondal entered the world of book publishing with this work. During the entire journey of this book, Mondal learned a lot from Brunsma, and vice-versa. Quite the team effort.
Mondal and Brunsma thank the contributors to this volume. Without their crucial scholarship, this book would not exist. Their work brought diverse perspectives and realities on urban dispossession from three continents—Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and seven countries—Bangladesh, Brazil, Honduras, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Uganda. These perspectives and the collected evidence help us create a comprehensive theoretical framework called urban regimes of dispossession. Future work should benefit from this cohesive framework.
All the chapters of this book are peer-reviewed by renowned scholars in urban studies and other disciplines. We are thankful to them for their valuable time and critical feedback on the chapters. We thank Shapan Adnan for writing a thoughtful Foreword for this volume. We are grateful to David Fasenfest for his continued support of this book project. We also thank Katie Short and Judy Pereira from Brill, who helped us navigate the publication process.
Since this book project was first initiated, much has happened in the world and our personal lives. We are grateful to our colleagues and friends for their moral support. We are ever grateful to our loved ones for their continued and kind support.