Raja, Sinduja. 2025. Beyond the State: Social Movements, Welfare Ecosystems, and New Political Subjectivities in Mexico and India (Under Review).

Abstract: This article examines how reformist movements created to demand change through the state instead reorient their expectations from it, transforming participants into critics of state-based reform. Drawing on 109 qualitative interviews from two movements, the Okupa Cuba occupation in Mexico City and the anti-CAA/NRC movement in New Delhi, I identify three mechanisms through which participants developed this new political subjectivity: political recognition, political substitution, and political transcendence. Both movements, despite violent suppression and official “failure,” provided participants with welfare ecosystems including childcare, healthcare, food distribution, education, and legal aid. I argue these trajectories reconfigure democracy’s terrain toward grassroots, collective life, generating durable transformations in state-society relations.

Raja, Sinduja. 2025. Securitized Resistance: new logics of security and protection in social movements (Under Review).

Abstract: This article examines how high-risk movements protect themselves from state repression and how these protection mechanisms shape participants’ political engagement. Using 109 qualitative interviews from the Okupa Cuba movement in Mexico City and the anti-CAA/NRC movement in New Delhi, I propose that such movements create a “securitization of resistance” that is hybrid in nature—drawing on top-down, state-based security logics like surveillance and bordering while simultaneously building security communities oriented toward collective care and self-determination. I argue this securitization reflects both short- and long-term community needs, shaping participants’ engagement with safety and community well past the movements’ end.

Raja, Sinduja. 2025. From Protest to Infrastructure: The Internal Spatial Orders of Social Movements in Mexico and India (In Progress).

Abstract: Why do social movements produce differentiated spatial infrastructures during mobilization? Drawing on 109 qualitative interviews and participant observation of two extended sit-in movements, the Okupa Cuba occupation in Mexico City (2020–2022) and the anti-CAA/NRC movement at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi (2019–2020), I argue that movements transform protest sites to address what I term spatial gaps: patterned unmet needs produced by state governance failures. This spatial differentiation operates through three pathways: the reconstruction of basic public infrastructure, the reconstitution of public social life, and the repair of domestic precarity. The paper shifts attention from the seizure and symbolization of protest space to its internal reorganization, contributing to literatures on both contentious politics and non-state governance.

Raja, Sinduja. 2025. Women’s Rights After War: reading harm on paper (with Milli Lake).

Drawing on an original qualitative dataset of gender-progressive laws across four issue areas and six country cases, we argue that the content of legal reforms creates and reiterates harm prior to implementation. By privileging a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalistic archetype of “woman,” such reforms reproduce self-undermining stereotypes at the outset. When this foundational harm interacts with implementation challenges, already marginalized populations are rendered further so—and political harms become more firmly institutionalized. Gender-sensitive legal reform can offer important inroads for women’s political recognition, but only when its foundational assumptions are interrogated.