Thachil Wins Awards for Book on Urban Migration and Political Power

Tariq Thachil’s book, Migrants and Machines: How Political Networks Form in Urbanizing India, coauthored with Adam Auerbach of Johns Hopkins University, was awarded the 2024 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA)’s Qualitative and Mixed-Methods Section and the 2024 Best Book award by APSA’s Experimental Research Section.

Thachil is the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) and Associate Professor of Political Science. As Director of CASI, he also holds the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. He studies political parties and political behavior, social movements, ethnic politics, and urban migration, with a regional focus on South Asia.

Migrants and Machines discusses the transformative potential of urbanization in India, which the authors argue hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. The book shows how slum residents in India are actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities.

The Giovanni Sartori Book Award honors Sartori’s work on qualitative methods and concept formation, especially his contribution to helping scholars think about problems of context as they refine concepts and apply them to new spatial and temporal settings. The Best Book Award recognizes a work that uses experimental research methods in the study of politics.