Missing maps and elastic eligibility: Archival securitization and retrospective arbitrage in Saigon and Mumbai

Introduction

In 2018, a scandal erupted in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, over the disappearance of a 1:5000-scale planning map that delineated the boundaries of the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area. Conceived in 1998 as a centerpiece of the city's modernization strategy, Thủ Thiêm is a planned development spanning 657 hectares of peri-urban land across the Saigon River from District 1, the city's central business district. Master planned by the internationally recognized US firm, Sasaki and Associates, the area extends the capital-intensive functions of District 1 through the development of financial buildings, luxury high-rise housing, and infrastructural corridors. By the late 2010s, large portions of the area's infrastructure were complete, and significant portions of vertical buildings were being built atop prepared land. It was at this stage—two decades into the project's planning and implementation—that officials publicly acknowledged that an original, ratified planning map had gone missing.

The disappearance of the map did not appear to be a bureaucratic mistake. The map disappeared just as the state made a claim to a long-standing neighborhood whose residents insisted that they had never been a part of the original scheme. These residents argued that the original, now missing, planning map demonstrated their exclusion from the authorized development zone. Finding the map would preserve their land, homes, and businesses from state seizure. Without the definitive archival document to adjudicate the matter, the state proceeded with the development and demolished homes and small businesses. Residents, in turn, accused authorities of erasing them from the city's records—an act with direct implications for their legal claims, compensation rights (and amounts), and livelihoods.

The controversy was not only about the disputed boundaries alone. Residents and state authorities alike produced copies of official maps—each stamped and sealed—to substantiate their respective positions. What unfolded was a battle of authoritative graphical artifacts, a form of what Erik Harms (2020) calls “cartographic action.” The proliferation of maps and archival documents also created multiple time horizons of claims, effectively creating avenues to reestablish which versions of land regulations could be applied to assess land value and compensation rates for residents. The state, in these instances, engaged in what we call backward-facing or retrospective arbitrage: changes to the archive aimed at increasing the gap between past and present land values.

In Vietnam, legal excess is inseparable from the composite formation of its legal order. Rather than emerging from a singular tradition, the system is assembled from overlapping inheritances: French colonial administrative law, socialist legal frameworks drawn from the Soviet Union and China, and more recent regulatory regimes shaped by international trade and development. These elements do not consolidate into a unified code; instead, they accumulate, generating a stratified and internally inconsistent legal landscape. Efforts at legal reform—often framed in terms of modernization, transparency, and standardization—have tended to intensify this layering, as new regulations are introduced without displacing earlier ones. As Bui Ngoc Son (2017) demonstrates, the scale of this expansion is striking: in the post–đổi mới (translated as “renovation” signaling the country's transition to capitalist practice) period (1987), Vietnam's legal system grew from just 309 formal laws to over 154,507 legal regulations—an increase by a factor of roughly five hundred. Today's system contains approximately 19 times the volume of legal texts produced in the preceding 50 years (1936–1986). Yet, these formal statutes represent only a small portion of the legal apparatus. A vast array of subordinate instruments—decrees, circulars, and ministerial guidelines—extend and reinterpret legislative authority and are used in battles between central government and decentralized lower-scale governing units (city, district, and ward), dispersing regulatory power across multiple bureaucratic sites and serving to proliferate a legal environment full of contradictions.

Under these conditions, law is best understood not as a stable structure but as an ongoing process of production. Regulatory texts are continually generated at every level of the state, from central ministries to provincial and local authorities, layering onto existing rules rather than replacing them. Initiatives framed as clarification frequently generate further ambiguity, expanding the terrain of interpretation instead of resolving it. For those navigating this environment—residents, officials, investors, and legal professionals alike—the experience is one of persistent disorientation, captured in the common expression of being “lost in the jungle of laws” (lạc giữa “rừng luật”). In this sense, Vietnam's legal order operates through the accumulation of documents rather than through coherence or closure.

This kind of ambiguity is familiar to anyone who researches similar modernization schemes and development projects in much of the world, where the exercise of power and its subversion often require the production of different maps and other forms of documentary evidence to support alternative accounts. In property development schemes, these modes of territorial claims-making operate alongside and appear to stand in contrast to the ideal typical frameworks of governance we are conditioned to expect. While the practical value of illegibility and ambiguity has been recognized as forms of resistance through occupancy and encroachment (Bayat, 2000; Benjamin, 2008; Hull, 2012), our conceptual frameworks remain anchored to a liberal imaginary in which power is exercised through the stabilization of specific forms of knowledge, typically constituting a statistical or territorial archive. Underpinned by Foucauldian notions of governmentality and biopower, we understand that archives regularize the past in order to domesticate an otherwise unruly future and are thus dependent on a sense of “immanence,” fixity, or immutability. With respect to securitizing territory, we understand that knowledge is institutionalized through bureaucratic practices like titling, conveyance, cadastral mapping, and recording systems, producing the documentary artifacts that underlie the power of state planning apparatuses. While it may appear that missing maps operate through a corruption of these ideal typical relations between knowledge and power, we argue instead that these illiberal practices remain firmly rooted in equally rationalized form. We suggest that the exercise of power through the missing map reflects not the absence or rejection of liberal governmentality and its associated technologies of bureaucratic rationality but rather produces alternative rationalizations of modern bureaucracy and government.

Such overproduction is not limited to spatial artifacts like maps and cadasters. In a comparable case from Mumbai elaborated below, logics of archival mutability operate through the overproduction of population artifacts; in this case, through eligibility lists, consent registers, household surveys, and cut-off criteria, which determine who counts as a liberal, rights-bearing subject. Recent scholarship in urban geography has moved to reframe these pathologies—corruption, informality, opacity—as structurally generative rather than aberrational. Liberal devices such as transparency laws, participatory consultations, and rights-based claims-making do not simply correct or clean up compromised archives; they can also be used to prise open files, expose inconsistencies, and create new layers of documentation that must themselves be interpreted, contested, and negotiated. In many contemporary urban struggles, activists and residents assemble counter-archives that unsettle official narratives but also thicken the field of interpretive ambiguity in which officials and developers continue to maneuver. As Truelove (2018) and Ranganathan et al. (2023) suggest, what appears as a challenge to illiberal governance from below can be absorbed into the same logic of illiberal archival management, generating more documents, more provisional agreements, and more managed indeterminacy rather than fundamentally unsettling the territorial project.

Like missing maps, competing lists, and elastic eligibility criteria circulate simultaneously, never fully adjudicated, preserving the interpretive elasticity on which we argue that certain forms of territorial authority have come to depend. Amid the proliferation of authority, rooted in modern notions and measures of time, bureaucratic proliferation has produced a crowded field of law, bureaucracy, history, and authority in the city (Collins, 2021; Collins, 2023), which serves to “colonize the future” (Giddens, 1990). Archival land and population artifacts and their bureaucracies operate not as repositories of facts but as troves of conflicting information that both governments and residents find themselves having to mobilize and strategically enlist in the service of establishing a past that aligns better with their anticipated futures.

Securitizing population and territory

The controversy of the missing maps in Thủ Thiêm, together with seemingly countless examples of illiberal governing acts and counterclaims, unsettles familiar assumptions about the relationship between knowledge and power, namely that territorial authority requires a stable archive that fixes both space and subject. Ideal-typical accounts of modern governance, particularly those underpinned by Foucauldian accounts of the liberal state, take for granted that security depends on regularizing the past in order to tame an unruly future.

In his famous lectures at the College de France in 1977–1978, Foucault outlined an itinerary of research in this vein, to be organized around three terms: security, territory, and population. These analyses of liberal government have predominantly examined how modern forms of rule restructure the relationship between power and subjectivity—how governments securitize the future by producing knowledge about populations and shape collective behaviors through institutional and technological intervention. Central to this body of work is the biopolitical shift through which the modern liberal state redefines its primary object of intervention: security no longer happens at the scale of territory but rather is applied to the population. Governance becomes oriented toward managing life itself—aggregating individuals into statistical collectives, regulating risk, and optimizing social processes; that is, the focus remains primarily on security and population.

By elevating knowledge about behavior via tools like statistics, states are able to instrumentalize a field of regularity, and in the process, intervene upon the welfare of populations. One of the outcomes of this utilitarian approach to knowledge is what Foucault calls security. Governments expand their predictive capabilities by refining modes of population surveillance, classification, and documentation, and through institutional intervention, can domesticate and securitize what were once unruly aspects of an unknown future.

Foucault ([1976] 2003; 1972; 2007 [1978]) differentiates between techniques of power that rule by deterrence and those invested in techniques of the self, biopolitical management of populations, and the regulation of environments. Relevant to this discussion is the production of a “milieu”—a structured field of circulation in which subjects, goods, and risks can be shaped through specific orientations of knowledge, surveillance, and intervention. Statistical information, cadastral surveys, demographic registers, and archival practices not only render people, places, events, and things calculable and legible to those who govern, but radically reformat them into discrete objects of knowledge that have a progressive time orientation. By elevating statistical and other facts about the past, governing institutions are able to codify behavior and events affecting populations into cycles of regularity—into rates of growth, rates of decline, incidence of disease and illness, among many other facets that constitute exposure to risk, which can then be used to produce a host of interventions aimed at securitizing the future: actuarial and probabilistic, guided by utilitarian logics of aligning means and ends. The result is a rationality of government that instrumentalizes and formats knowledge about the past to take hold over the future. These temporal alignments of knowledge and power are what we refer to as securitization. Security here is done in the name of citizen welfare and establishes the modern state's power relation with its citizenry, who consent to this form of government in exchange for the state's commitment to optimizing and preserving life—what Foucault dubbed, “biopower,” inaugurating state-subject power relations centered on welfare.

While the relation between security and population is distinguishable under this framework, territory can often appear as a secondary concern—that is, as the spatial container within which populations and their regularities take center stage as the core objects of government administration. However, genealogical accounts of territory complicate this assumption. As Stuart Elden (2013; 2019) argues, territory must be understood not simply as the bounded surface over which sovereignty is exercised, but as something actively produced through the same techniques of knowledge/power that constitute populations: forms of measurement, calculation, and control over territory's futurity. Territory under modernity, like population, requires transformation.

As Elden writes:

Just as the people become understood as both discrete individuals and their aggregated whole, the land they inhabit is also something that is understood in terms of its geometric, rational properties, or ‘qualities’. Territory is a political technology: it comprises techniques for measuring land and techniques for controlling terrain. Foucault's analysis of the politics of calculation is, therefore, crucial, but not as something which only manifests itself in population, but, rather, in territory too. The same kinds of mechanisms that Foucault looks at in relation to population are used to understand and control territory. (2013)

Acts of archival disappearance and documentary arbitrage do not negate the presence and production of the rule of law in the country. Instead, the program of rationalizing land under more “traditional” forms of liberal modern practice exists alongside these other practices. They constitute the country's ever-present “reform” and now over 40-year “economic transition” trajectory. Influenced by a circulating discourse about “global standards” produced by international development agencies, NGOs, domestic technocrats, and private investors, Vietnam's institutional restructuring is prioritized as a bulwark against corruption through the adoption of global governance standards aligned with liberal rationality (Dunn, 2005; Hindess, 2005; Ranganathan et al., 2023; Wedel, 2012). Within the land sector, this has meant that the state has engaged in activities aimed at strengthening legal frameworks, harmonizing land regulation with principles associated with Western private property regimes, building centralized land archives, formalizing titling and conveyance bureaucracies—often in conformance with Torrens principles like “title-by-registration,” implementing cadastral surveys, and enhancing administrative capacity to codify and demarcate space—to render it legible to modern conceptions of territorial space-time. The goal has been to transform land into a transparent and predictable asset base—a stable platform for planning, infrastructural coordination, and capital accumulation.

Yet legibility is not the only modality through which the land regime is rationalized. These reforms assume that territorial security can only be achieved through forms of archival stabilization. Authority is therefore grounded in durable records and a chronologically ordered legal field, and the establishment of the rule of law and North Atlantic standards of property formation. Once territory is properly measured, titled, and archived, it is presumed to become governable in a reliable and forward-oriented way. Yet, the revision of the archive, exemplified in the missing map case, does not signal a collapse of some preexisting rule-based order. It instead proliferates the state's territorial authority through equally bureaucratic and legally complex forms of archival revision. Thus, if liberal rationality secures space and time through archival permanence and linearity, the Thủ Thiêm case suggests a different configuration—one in which archival and spatiotemporal elasticity becomes an operational facet of securitizing and rationalizing the spatial regime.

The term “illiberal securitization” is loosely linked in other geographic inquiries, particularly studies that examine the forms of exceptional rule that are applied within territory to migrant, refugee populations, and to discuss concepts in political science, like global or state security (Kopper et al., 2020; Lazell, 2016; Skleparis, 2016). While applications of these terms remain useful, we invoke the term more broadly to discuss the relation between knowledge/power, territory, and population. To this end, by illiberal securitization, we do not mean the abandonment of legality, or a disavowal of rationalized bureaucracy, nor a form of exception to some other normative order of administrative coherence. Illiberal land securitization describes governing strategies that secure authority over urban space through alternative approaches that reformat the temporal orientation of knowledge-power. They are thus alternate modes of governmental rationalization that emphasize the “becoming” of space rather than its categorical stability.

In our view, securitization does not discard the instruments of liberal securitization. Maps, decrees, plans, and titles still proliferate, as do eligibility registers and other forms of documentary proof that determine who may claim inclusion in a redevelopment scheme. Legal texts remain central to their application and calculation is still a key aspect of its practice. Yet, authority is not anchored exclusively in the knowledge-power arrangement that grants immanence to an archive of calculable, immutable facts and statistics aimed at regularizing space and securitizing its future through predictive metrics and institutionalized intervention. Instead, spatial demarcations and temporal reference points remain selectively adjustable through an equally utilitarian desecration of the archive. Territory and its future are secured not by fixing and stabilizing its coordinates and its past, but by preserving the capacity to reorder them in the past and create multiple, conflicting versions of archive, fact, and plan.

Securitization through biopolitics/population management

In Mumbai, efforts to transform “slumlands” into monetizable property reveal other examples of illiberal securitization built atop liberal archival overproduction. The consent clause of Mumbai's Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS), which requires that 70% of eligible hutment-dwellers agree to redevelopment before any land can be cleared, appears on its face to instantiate a liberal principle of collective decision-making. The scheme's eligibility framework, pegged to a moving cut-off date (currently January 1, 2000) and a 1991 legal definition of “hutment” as “four walls and a roof,” appears similarly rule-bound and compliant with the rule of law. In practice, however, developers and state officials treat both eligibility and consent as elastic categories (Baliga and Weinstein, 2022). Rules about cut-off dates enable the SRA and developers to perform a temporal roll-back analogous to the state's recourse in the Vietnam case, anchoring who is counted and what they are owed to earlier moments that narrow the eligibility window and minimize costs. Yet, while the state appears firm about rules and cut-off dates, eligibility lists are never finalized. Names are continually added, dropped, and contested through a parallel proliferation of right to information (RTI) petitions, court filings, and developer-organized enumeration exercises.

In the rehabilitation of a cluster of central Mumbai neighborhoods under Omkar Realtor's “1973” luxury development project in Worli, completed in 2024, the neighborhood of Hanuman Nagar illustrates the usefulness and production of value through elasticity. As eligibility lists were compiled by community leaders and government officials, a problem arose around thirty Tamil families who had moved in after the official year-2000 cut-off date and thus did not appear on the list. Activists with the Mumbai-based Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan (GBGBA), working closely with area residents, advocating for their rights to stay put, helped the Hanuman Nagar residents to press their claims. Employing a liberal transparency device—the RTI petition—GBGBA obtained the full set of project documents filed by Omkar and the relevant government authorities. Once they began combing through the files, as one GBGBA activist put it, they “always found something wrong with the project,” identifying missing environmental clearances and other procedural irregularities that allowed residents to take Omkar to court to halt construction. To avoid prolonged delays, Omkar's founding director, Babulal Varma, personally entered the final round of negotiations, and each of the thirty ineligible families ultimately received a payment of three million rupees (30 lakh) to vacate. In this sense, the eligibility list did not function as a stable roster of rights-bearing subjects. It operated instead as a starting point for bespoke settlement, a hall of mirrors in which ostensibly liberal categories of eligibility and consent could be invoked, challenged, and selectively suspended in the same gesture.

Read against ideal-typical accounts of archival fixity and legible population management, the Hanuman Nagar episode shows how bureaucratic practice can actively cultivate the opposite, generating an archive that is rule-bound yet endlessly revisable. The consent clause and eligibility criteria appear as instruments of liberal rationalization, but they are deployed in ways that keep both status and value permanently negotiable. In Mumbai, as in Thủ Thiêm, residents and activists mobilize liberal devices—RTI petitions, court challenges, and documentary scrutiny—to expose inconsistencies and create counter-archives. Yet these efforts are recursive, leading to further rounds of list-making and discretionary settlements rather than a standardized settlement of rights. What looks like arbitrariness at the level of Hanuman Nagar's 30 Tamil families is, at the level of the regime, patterned and instrumental. Elastic eligibility, like the missing map, becomes a technique of illiberal securitization that preserves the capacity to reorder subjects and entitlements in retrospect, consolidating territorial authority through the very instability of the archive.

Securitization and retrospective arbitrage

In both the Saigon and Mumbai cases, residents and officials alike are compelled to participate as active producers of artifacts of bureaucratic rationalization, assembling their own documentary chains in order to make claims over space. These cases reveal the kinds of recombinant bureaucracy in which residents and officials alike engage. In both cases, negotiations between displaced residents and state authorities and broader compensation disputes revealed deeper conflicts over governmental temporalities. Residents in Thủ Thiêm testified that they had purchased their homes for much more than the compensation rates set by the state. They also alleged that because the state's land reclamation was originally planned in 2001 (even though for these residents, it wasn’t carried out until 2018), their compensation rates were set under the 1993 land law, which prevailed at the time, meaning that even though their land had increased in value significantly since 2001, they would only be compensated according to principles laid out in the 1993 land law, well below market rate for their homes.

Residents’ statements illuminated a critical dynamic: as it became clear that expropriation would not be reversed, resident compensation hinged on which temporal frame would be recognized as authoritative. State authorities anchored valuation to earlier moments, effectively rolling back time to minimize payouts. Residents invoked present market valuations. The missing map controversy exposed not only an archival struggle over spatial boundaries of the development but a struggle over its temporal boundaries and reference points as well. These forms of archival revision enabled the state to practice retrospective arbitrage—the revision of archival artifacts to reassign and capitalize on land value. Following Mackenzie (2009), we understand arbitrage as simultaneously a physical and social process by which forms of trading aim “to make low-risk profits by exploiting discrepancies in the price of the same asset or in the relative prices of similar assets” (85). In our usage, the discrepancies being exploited are produced through archival manipulation, in essence, changing past valuation. In this way, retrospective arbitrage inverts what Neil Smith (2005) identifies as the rent gap. Instead of exploiting differences in present value and potential value in the future, retrospective arbitrage manipulates past archival facts to widen gaps in value between past and present. Archival manipulation thus reconfigures the temporal possibilities of state tools of both rationalization and variations of speculative urbanism with respect to the land regime. By determining which moment counts as legally binding, authorities are able to recalibrate the relationship between past regulation and present market price. It is in this way that the state links its illiberal and territorial form of security to financialized forms of securitization in the form of a backward-facing or retrospective arbitrage. ¹

In the aftermath of the maps debacle, after extended political conflict and national media scrutiny, the state upheld its right to expropriate the contested land. In early 2020, the Party's Central Inspection Committee disciplined senior officials involved in the project, citing extensive management errors that had “negatively affected local socioeconomic growth and the lives of a certain portion of the population.” Yet the underlying land expropriations were not reversed. This outcome reflects a familiar pattern in Vietnam's late socialist governance: blame can be individualized and publicly performed through the analytic of corruption, but the results of archival manipulation cannot be questioned. Accountability operates to preserve the Communist Party's legitimacy without fundamentally destabilizing its territorial claims.

The eligibility lists and missing maps operate as modes of governance in which archival revision and temporal recalibrations of facts function as techniques to securitize territory and arbitrage land retrospectively. As in the Vietnamese case, the production of eligibility criteria for “slum” rehabilitation in Mumbai depends on the creation of provisional and drafted territorial claims that are then subject to repeated change, what Jonnalagadda and Cowan (2024) refer to as “city drafting.” Central to these practices are rationalized bureaucracies that claim to uphold the stability of archives but actively take part in shaping the political life of territory by erasing, altering, and misappropriating records (Hull, 2012). Ghertner (2024), for example, draws upon Derrida's (2016 [1939]) Of Grammatology, noting that the “grammatological reduction” of urban space to their artifactual and archival forms like graphical cadasters, documents, records, titles, are abstractions that produce “epistemological erasures” of the situated and political contexts in which they operate.

There are important differences between these acts of revision and erasure and dominant ideal type theories that explain how territory and space is rationalized and securitized, particularly with respect to bureaucratic practices that produce and stabilize territory. Following Foucault, governments securitize the future at the level of population through modern relations of knowledge and power. In the case of territory, modern governments measure space and plot rights and boundaries onto maps and cadasters, among many other forms of abstraction related to property and titling, which work in concert to establish a forward-looking archive of both property and development (Kim 2024). Documents and their bureaucratic institutions must anchor the relation between governmental authority and those who use the territory. Yet what happens when government control over territory intensifies through the instability and revision of archives? How should we theorize forms of land securitization that do not rely on the rationalizing bureaucratic processes of documentary permanence, but instead rationalize space through strategic indeterminacy and erasure?

The examples we present here invite us to consider how space and time are securitized under different political rationalities. Scholarship shows how such practices are forms of exception, informality, antithesis, or reaction to some presumed modern governmental norm (Brenner et al., 2010; Ong, 2006; Ong, 2008; Roy, 2009). In spite of these theorizations, phenomena like the missing map and the elastic list should be understood as forms of rationalization and bureaucratization in their own right, not as exception, variation, or as irregular to some perceived formal rational conception government. These kinds of territorial securitization reveal alternative, but equally troubling, articulations of modern territorial power.

Illegibility from above

The cases we discuss extend Akhil Gupta's (2012) recognition that the bureaucratic violence produced through the proliferation of “red tape” is not simply a matter of incompetence or corruption, but a form of rule in its own right. As documents multiply, delays accumulate in service of state and developer objectives rather than in spite of them. The list that can always be reopened for the sake of finding “something wrong” overproduces the archive in ways that condition elastic outcomes. What reads as arbitrariness at the level of an individual case is, in this sense, patterned and instrumental at the level of the regime, as discretionary departures from the rules become central techniques through which illiberal modes of securitization work (Ghertner, 2024; Hull, 2012; Jonnalagadda and Cowan, 2024; Truelove, 2018).

James C. Scott's work on legibility grounds these processes in spatial control. In Seeing Like a State, Scott (1998) argues that modern states seek to simplify complex social and ecological realities through technologies like censuses and cadastral mapping alongside patronymic naming systems that replace fluid identities with fixed surnames. These techniques of government render populations calculable through enumeration and conscription. For Scott, legibility is a precondition of modern technologies of control over both territory and its populations. High-modernist schemes—whether in urban planning or collectivized forms of agriculture—operate through the assumption that social and spatial complexity can be rationally ordered and inscribed with the sheen of a progressive history.

Importantly, Scott also illuminates the limits of this process in his theories on geographies of illegibility. In his work on peasant and rural politics of resistance in Southeast Asia (1976; 1985; 1998; 2009), especially a highland border region he terms “Zomia,” Scott describes how hill tribes have evaded state capture through practices that resisted enumeration, written codification, and archival fixation. This “art of not being governed” is a cultivated cultural technology of illegibility, enabling autonomy through oral tradition, ritual, and spatial dispersion cultivated in the liminal spaces between empires over millennia. Illegibility, in his account, becomes a cultural tactic of resistance.

Scott's argument captures illegibility as a cultural tactic from below but does not develop a vocabulary for understanding it as a governing technique from above. Others, like Appadurai (2010; 1996) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2006; 2000) have explored how cultural forms can be read as a kind of resistance to the rationalization processes of global capitalism. Here, “occult economies,” or enchanted forms of accumulation, counterfeit modernities and “lawfare” highlight how, on the one hand, the powerful utilize disorder and cynical applications of law to engage in forms of predation on the powerless, and on the other, and how cultural formations can be read as a form of resistance to the homogenizing and enclosing characteristics of global capitalism. The problem with these interpretations, however, is that they normalize liberal rationalization as the measure against which illiberal practices, which are read as “disorder” should be evaluated. Following Achille Mbembe (2020), such analyses can inadvertently reproduce a familiar hierarchy of reason. By casting postcolonial responses to global capitalism as culturally saturated or enchanted, they risk stabilizing the Euro-Atlantic world as the privileged site of rationality, bureaucratic procedural normalcy, and standardization through law. Making culture illegible forecloses the possibility of seeing the illegible and the opaque as political technologies and governmental rationalities in their own right.

A similar interpretation frames the rise of illiberalism as the consequential endpoint of liberal rationality itself. Wendy Brown's (2023) analysis of “nihilistic times,” provides a powerful diagnosis of how instrumental reason hollows out democratic institutions and produces crises of value. Following Weber's (2004 [1919]) “Politics as Vocation,” Brown argues that our recent slide into illiberal forms of authoritarianism and fascism are attributable to a crisis in values that was ironically produced by the modern turn towards liberal scientific and technocratic approaches to political rule. Our descent was caused by the crisis of meaning created by modern processes of rationalization and disenchantment. Science's capacity to demystify and disenchant the world gave it powers to supplant religion (and other forms of enchantment) as a truth-making endeavor, but it could not provide a basis for establishing an ethical ground for progress. In the world of government and politics, rationalization took the form of an economistic and calculative utilitarian approach. As scientific, statistical, and probabilistic models stripped power from the meaning-making institutions of religion, they reduced the important question of “how shall we live,” to one that instead focused on aligning means and ends. As Weber argues, the rationalizing project of modernity stripped meaning from social life, binding society within an “iron cage” of calculation without a set of anchoring existential values. The result was the instrumentalization of our value systems. As Brown writes, “Everything becomes an instrument, and power begets only more power, wealth only more wealth, calculation only more calculation. Instrumental reason itself is embodied in giant “human machineries” becoming our “iron cages” and converting what originated as a means for meeting needs into an order of domination” (p. 14).

Brown's thesis, compelling as it is, situates the current anti-democratic, authoritarian, and fascist impulses constituting the global interregnum as borne out of liberal enlightenment thinking. It is, in other words, a phenomenon that must be understood within the intellectual genealogy of Western political thought. Her concern is with the undoing of liberalism by its own internal contradictions—the hollowing out of democratic institutions, the reanimation of fascist aesthetics, and the epistemic vacuum left in the wake of a government disenchanted: a utilitarian politics without existential value. Like Weber, Brown's analytic focus is grounded in North-Atlantic formations of liberal rationality and value. But what of the postcolonial and post-socialist settings where authoritarian and illiberal surges continue, but where “liberalism” was never normalized as a dominant rationality, and where modern governance has long taken on hybrid and contested forms?

The Spectre of Comparisons

To assume that postcolonial or postsocialist/late-socialist places exemplified in the Vietnam and India cases are undergoing some delayed version of liberal collapse obscures the layered histories of governance in places of the global South. As Benedict Anderson (1991) observes in The Spectre of Comparisons, nationalist and modern imaginaries in the region were not copies of Enlightenment modernity but instead were “creolized” into rationales composed of a panopoly of hybridized and contradictory versions of the modern. These hybridized ideals led to the formation of syncretic imaginations of nation, region, economy, and, importantly, institutional and bureaucratic forms of governmental rationalization.

But when examining cases like the missing map case in Vietnam or list-making in India, it becomes clear that we cannot solely apprehend territorial governance through applications of Weberian rationalization or Foucauldian governmental reason. Nor can it be easily captured by appeals to variegated or exceptional forms of global neoliberalism. In Vietnam, while liberal and neoliberal logics of rule are certainly influential, there is not a coherent and normalized bureaucratic and liberal framework that can cannibalize itself through what we might identify as some unified semblance of neoliberal policy. Rather, liberal and neoliberal rationalities and practices are modular and syncretic, woven from transnational policy scripts, socialist-era moral vocabularies, and localized practices of bureaucratic negotiation that contain elements of colonial and precolonial rationales. Law, bureaucracy and its attendant “archival” and documentary functions, are formed out of what legal theorists like Sally Engle Merry (1988; 2014) refer to as “legal pluralism”—the existence of multiple orders of rule and claims to space that co-exist and come into conflict in the same social reality.

Rationalization in this context does not produce an ideal-typical disenchanted political economy in the Weberian sense but instead gives rise to assemblages that are ideologically unstable and often opaque to liberal interpretive frameworks (Ong and Collier, 2005). In this way, the presence of multiple genealogies—what Mariana Valverde (2011) reminds us are the premodern and informal legal and bureaucratic practices that continue to be called upon, particularly when rationalized systems fail to make sense to communities. They also point to a temporal order that is “crowded” with multiple histories comprising a field of “chronopolitics” (Collins, 2021). Their existence unsettles traditional “chronotopes” of urbanization (Zeiderman, 2016) and they resemble what Fisher (2016) explains are the “material-symbolic permanences” of graphical and legal artifacts that produce durable delineations of space whose value requires discursive codifications of space into immanent forms over time.

These “specters of comparison” reveal key assumptions built into discourses on rationalization: The non-liberal and undemocratic has, in global policy worlds, become pathological—to be understood through conceptual black-boxes like corruption, authoritarianism, irrational or occult forms of government, or as extremes of exception to some normalizing order. Building on this critique, a growing body of work has shown how the idiom of “corruption” and related distinctions between licit and illicit practices often function to recenter liberal norms rather than to explain actually existing governance (Appel, 2019; Baker and Milne, 2015; Bukovansky, 2006; Hindess, 2005; Hoang, 2022; Ranganathan et al., 2023; Kim, 2020; Tucker, 2023; Weinstein, 2008). Rather than treating opaque transactions, side payments, or discretionary departures from the rules as deviations from an otherwise coherent order, these studies foreground them as routine techniques through which states, officials, and their intermediaries govern, allocate resources, and consolidate authority. In this sense, what appear as irregularities from the standpoint of a global governance template are better understood as part of the everyday repertoire of rule, and thus as key sites for tracing the epistemologies and spatial logics of illiberal governance on their own terms. How then should we approach illiberal forms of governance not as an aberration, pathology, or deviant from some presumed ethical or rational standard, but as epistemic formations in their own right? What historical basis is there to apprehend the illiberal as something with its own routinized logics of (il)legibility, legitimation, and spatial practice to be characterized as a form of rationalization and securitization?

As the examples explored above show, these rationalities are visible in land seizures, retrospective land arbitrage, and infrastructural spectacle. Such acts are produced by a separate set of what Foucault calls rationalizing “epistemes” or “logics” of government that set the conditions of possibility for becoming—for change. We have discussed this logic by examining forms of archival erasure, the overproduction of law and regulations, and the overproduction of population-sorting instruments like eligibility lists, consent registers, and cut-off dates. As the Mumbai case suggests, illiberal securitization is not confined to the spatialization of territory; it also operates through the illiberal management of who counts as a territorial subject. These acts are bureaucratic forms of rationalization. Far from signaling a failure of government, these anti-archival forms of rule are generative—they produce a different framework of temporality while maintaining bureaucratic and administrative coherence. In this sense, urban planning in global South locales like Saigon and Mumbai are not merely technocratic but deeply performative, reliant on the selective visibility and invisibility of documentary traces and forms of archival evidence. Disappearing and delegitimizing spatial artifacts along a spectrum of time exemplifies a broader pattern of illiberal logics of rule: producing alternative modalities of modernity and mutating progressive notions of governmental space-time are rationalizing acts that render urban space both governable and legible using an entirely different ethic of production.

These observations do not invalidate Foucault or Scott. Rather, they suggest that the modern securitization of space may exceed the theoretical limits of ideal-typical notions of archive, space, and time. Our traditional notions of governmentalization and rationalization therefore constitute one modality. But a wholly distinct form of governmental rationalization made manifest through legal and bureaucratic practice undergirds important productions of space in the illiberal city. If the modern state secures territory by fixing space and sequencing time, how might we conceptualize regimes in which space and time are secured through elasticity? What analytic vocabulary allows us to move beyond the opposition between rational legibility and cultural illegibility?

The cases from Saigon and Mumbai suggest that illiberal forms of securitization do not operate in the absence of a liberal ethic of modernity, space, and time. It relies on the same instruments that underpin liberal governance, including cadastral maps, titling systems, eligibility lists, consent clauses, and transparency devices such as RTI. What distinguishes illiberal spatial securitization is not the abandonment of law or bureaucracy, but their recombination into spatially and temporally alternative frameworks where becoming is prioritized over stability. This is not a transitional condition. It is a patterned way of governing land, housing, and infrastructure in which security is pursued through the managed instability of the archive rather than its fixity or closure.