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

This article contends with illiberal modes of territorial securitization as forms of urban governance that secure authority through bureaucratic practices that destabilize territorial archives and the presumed fixity of property, land, and planning. Drawing on cases from Ho Chi Minh City and Mumbai, it examines the disappearance of a ratified planning map in the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area and the recalibration of eligibility lists in Mumbai's Slum Rehabilitation Scheme—both are instances of archival revision that produce elastic rather than fixed territorial and population categories. Rather than treating these practices as corruption or breakdown, the article argues that they are patterned techniques of rule emerging from the overproduction of liberal bureaucratic instruments.