In this chapter, I am examining the Pashtun nationalist claims in the context of the Afghanistan government’s historical resistance to officially recognizing the Durand Line. What has been the reaction of Afghanistan’s successive governments to the Durand Line? Can this resistance be characterized as a national reaction irrespective of the people’s ethnicity, language and religion?

Or would it be more accurate to describe it as a political project by the ethnocentric Pashtun ruling elites to unify Pashtuns and to maintain their monopoly on power?

This topic is important because the official position of the Afghan government on Durand Line has had both external and internal consequences, fostering geopolitical conflict with its eastern neighbor, Pakistan, as well as alienating its non-Pashtun citizens. If the problem persists, the current instability in Afghanistan will continue with its people paying the price.

Speaker
Sharif Hozoori has a PhD in International Relations from the Center for International Politics, Organization, and Disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

Currently, Sharif is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Government. His research focuses on Afghanistan politics and foreign policy, comparative politics, Central Asian and Middle Eastern affairs.

Sharif has authored several journal articles and book chapters in both national and international publications. His recent book, The Political Elites and Foreign Policy at Mullah Omar’s Emirate and Karzai’s Republic (in Persian), was published in 2024 but subsequently banned by the Taliban authorities. His most recent article, “Taliban 1.0 and 2.0 in Afghanistan: Same Policies, Persistent Vision,” appeared in the Journal of Strategic Studies in June 2025.

Sharif is presently working on two additional book chapters and one journal article. The current talk is based on his under-review book chapter contribution to Oxford University Press’s Oxford Handbook of South Asian Borders.

Talk by Llerena Guiu Searle (Anthropology, University of Rochester)

In order to build a more just world order, philosopher Olúfémi Táíwo argues that we must contend with the fact that our current social order builds on relations of colonialism that did not end with colonial independence in the 1940s-1960s. Slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism have created what he calls the “Global Racial Empire” which accumulates advantages and disadvantages, harms and capabilities unevenly (2022). How might we understand “design” as a set of practices that operates within such a world system? Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with furniture and interior designers in India, this talk examines the ways in which designers navigate capitalist markets that continue to be haunted by colonialism. On the one hand, creative experts shaping elite Indian homes describe design as an anti-colonial project, poised to free India from tastes, fashions, and products from abroad. On the other, designers navigate hierarchies of values set by global markets, including demand for exotic, uniquely “Indian” products. Furniture and interior production also relies on production methods still defined through neocolonial discourses of “crafts difference” (McGowan 2009) and on caste and class dynamics that legitimize labor exploitation. By investigating how these unseen forces – histories, values, and ideologies – structure design practice in India, this paper contributes to our understanding of the politics of the creative industries and their imbrication in “Global Racial Empire.”

Llerena Guiu Searle is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Visual & Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she also co-edits the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series. She is the author of Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her research examines capitalism and the production of the built environment in urban India.

IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Further details TBA.

About the speaker

Herbert Lin is a senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His work focuses on the national security impact of emerging technologies, especially digital technologies such as cyber, artificial intelligence, and influence operations. He directs and serves as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review (setr.stanford.edu). Lin is Chief Scientist, Emeritus for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, leading key studies on public policy and information technology from 1990 to 2014. He served on President Obama’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity in 2016, was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019, participated in the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder in 2020, and was on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board from 2016 to 2025. Previously, he was a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee, focusing on defense policy and arms control. Lin holds a doctorate in physics from MIT.

Avocationally, he is a longtime folk and swing dancer (and sometimes dance teacher), a very mediocre magician (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqgpaiK1xh8), and a connoisseur of dim sum.

In the late 1990s, as the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began, stories of past abuse, including sexual violence, within the exiled camps of the African National Congress (ANC) emerged. Despite women alluding to or directly describing violence they had suffered within the ANC, ultimately the final report of the TRC made little reference to sexual violence or violence against women within the ANC. It instead focussed on ‘political’ violence, including torture and execution, meted out to members suspected of being (or found to be) spies. While officially gender neutral, this political violence was inescapably gendered male, as only male victims were discussed, and always within the frame of ‘political violence’, even when the torture they suffered had a sexual character. Women’s experiences were not investigated as political violence. This paper reads the TRC’s and ANC’s deployments of the concept of ‘politics’ to ask how these approaches frame or erase violence against women in the context of a political movement, and how particular violence is defined as ‘political’ or ‘intimate.’

Speaker

Rachel Sandwell is assistant professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. She works on the intellectual and social history of decolonization in southern Africa, with a particular focus on women and gender politics. Her first book, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: Sex, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid, was published with Ohio University Press, New African Histories series in late 2025.

This article examines how international monitoring affects legal accountability for human rights violations. International organizations often publicize human rights violations to pressure non-compliant states to change their behavior; however, recent research suggests that publicity can prompt intransigence or backlash, undercutting the advancement of human rights. Drawing on the sociological concept of reactivity, I argue that states respond to monitoring strategically: they adopt some visible accountability measures to signal their intention to comply, while also attempting to reduce the risk that future violations will be uncovered. To test this argument, I leverage a lottery used to determine the schedule of Universal Periodic Review, a human rights monitoring mechanism implemented by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Consistent with my argument, I find that monitoring increases the likelihood that political prisoners are released and that government officials are prosecuted for past violations, but decreases the likelihood that truth commissions are created.

Speaker

Averell Schmidt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. He studies international relations, with a focus on the politics of international law and organizations. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2024, and joined Cornell in 2025 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University.

Research Focus:
I have two interrelated research agendas. One investigates how withdrawals from international organizations and multilateral treaties impact diplomatic relationships and the dynamics of international cooperation. The other examines the politics of human rights, with a focus on how international institutions affect human rights practices and how states contest these institutions. Across both agendas, my work is grounded in an interest in how norms and social processes shape international politics.

Saida Hodžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University

Saida Hodžić, associate professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, studies women’s rights activism, NGO advocacy, humanitarianism, and civic environmental activism. Her first book, The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) has won the Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize by the Association for Feminist Anthropology, granted to a first book that embodies the theoretical rigor, ethnographic richness and advancement of feminist scholarship, as well as the Amaury Talbot Book Prize for African Anthropology by the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, Affective Encounters: Humanitarian Afterlives of War and Violence and For Whom is Africa Rising? Unsettling Transnational Feminism in the 21st Century.

She received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell as well as the Rosenthal Advancement of College of Arts and Sciences Women Faculty Award. She has been a faculty fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities and at the Institute for Social Science. She is also a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Research Grant and the Diane Forsythe Dissertation Award for Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Health.

Her courses on the intersections of feminism, global health, human rights, governance, and engaged anthropology address pressing political concerns and pay equal attention to critical theory, ethnographic inquiry, intersectional analysis, and movements for social justice. Recent courses include “Politics Beyond the State: Activism, Advocacy, and NGOs,” “Humanitarian Affects,” “A Global Controversy: How to Study a Human Rights Violation,” “Drugs and Social Justice,” and “Gender, Liberalism, and Postcolonial Theory.”

Presented by Alex V. Barnard, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University (NYU)

Is there an underlying order to how societies classify, treat, and control madness? Both popular and scholarly portrayals of contemporary mental health systems emphasize service fragmentation and inter-professional competition. In this talk, I draw on a year of in-depth fieldwork in France, including observations in a public mental health clinic, social service office, and courts, supplemented with nearly two-hundred interviews with administrators and clinicians, to show the underlying logic to the trajectories of people with serious mental illness through the welfare state. As I show, decision-making across these sites is linked by a shared conception, both embedded in formal policy and informal practices, of what makes someone a malade—a real mentally-ill person. This strong medical and bureaucratic identity ties this population to a paternalist, protective psychiatric system, in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the absence of a clear administrative category for this population leads to a chaotic mix of coercion and care from jails, shelters, and hospitals. While these results reveal the power of the French state to construct a particular definition of what it means to have a serious mental illness, I show how defining the population in this way constrains attempts to reform the system. This talk suggests how the dynamic interplay between categories adopted in official policy, used in professional practice, and adopted by populations themselves can reproduce national differences, even in an era where psychiatric knowledge and medical treatment are converging across national borders.

Speaker

Alex V. Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His work examines medical and bureaucratic decision-making, welfare policy, and social control comparatively. His previous book, Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia University Press), examines California's involuntary treatment system, showing how a failure of government oversight and inter-agency coordination leads to the extensive use of coercive interventions that provide neither care nor control. Ongoing projects include examining trends in national legislation around involuntary psychiatric treatment, analyzing variation in the policing of protests and university responses to the 2024 student protest encampments, and the governance of emerging addictions to online gambling and AI.

Co-hosted by the Department of Sociology Colloquium Series

Talk by Sadia Mahmood, South Asia Program, Cornell University

Mainstream historiography on South Asia has largely overlooked the afterlives of the colonial Enemy Property regime in postcolonial India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records from Pakistan and India, as well as oral accounts from the Thar borderlands of Sindh, this talk traces how “enemy property” was produced, contested, and redistributed in early postcolonial South Asia. I situate Pakistan’s practices of seizing and reallocating enemy-owned assets within a longer international legal genealogy that emerged during World Wars I and II, when the confiscation of enemy property became a routine instrument of wartime governance. Transplanted into British India, this legal and administrative apparatus continued to shape Pakistan’s bureaucratic imagination during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars. I argue that the category of enemy property migrated from a European imperial wartime technology to a postcolonial mode of governing minorities in South Asia, often blurring the distinction between wartime enemies and religious communities deemed politically suspect. In the Thar borderlands, the ruins of officially classified “enemy properties” function not only as material remnants but also as markers of social and emotional vulnerability through which local populations continue to navigate their dispossession.

Sadia Mahmood is an Assistant Professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, Pakistan, and a Visiting Scholar at the South Asia Program, Cornell University. Her work examines the making of postcolonial religious minorities, the histories of caste-oppressed communities, and state-making in Pakistan. Her research centers on the desert borderlands of Tharparkar, where memories of the 1971 Indo-Pak war continue to shape collective memory and everyday life. She works with Pakistan’s diverse Hindu and Sikh communities in Sindh and Punjab provinces. Her articles have appeared in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2024), where she published “The Long Migration: Revisiting the Postcolonial Minority/Refugee Crisis and Governance in East Pakistan,” and in The Indian Economic & Social History Review (2023), where she published “Untouchability, Caste, and the Electorate: Revisiting Legacies of the Poona Pact in Pakistan.” She also has forthcoming contributions, including “Historical Lines in the Dunes: Tharparkar,” in the Handbook of Sindhi Studies (Routledge).