Many contemporary theorists and practitioners of disobedience have questioned whether civility and nonviolence ought to be requisite components of legitimate dissent. While sharing their skepticism of overly narrow, prescriptive formulations of a moral or legal right to disobedience, Professor Karuna Mantena considers broader practices of civility and explores their purpose and function in terms of the political logic of nonviolent protest. She does so by way of a historical and conceptual analysis of why and how Gandhi introduced civility into the theory and practice of nonviolent disobedience. The emphasis on civility in disobedience marks a significant departure from Thoreau’s understanding, in which the term “civil” designated the object of resistance (namely, civil government or the state) and not its character.

Gandhi began to insist on civility in nonviolent protest as a remedy to the violence that accompanied his first attempts at mass satyagraha in India (1919-1922). He diagnosed this violence as stemming in part from the unmasterable character of political action. Civility as a form of self-discipline was devised to manage and mitigate action’s inherent hazards. The speaker will highlight two novel aspects of this formulation: the ways in which civility was to be formalized, performed, and dramatized in satyagraha and how such practices served to make protest more persuasive.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Karuna Mantena is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT). She is the author of Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (2010), which analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

One year ago, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered the Arg (Presidential palace) in Kabul, completing their astonishingly rapid takeover of Afghanistan. At the end of that same month, US forces completed withdrawal from Afghanistan – marking an end to the longest war in American history. One year later, our speakers reflect on Afghanistan’s recent history, life under the Taliban regime, and what we might expect in the near future as the Taliban engages with the international community. We welcome attendees to join us for a fireside conversation about this critical geopolitical topic.

Speakers

Zinab Zhra Attai, Reppy Institute Director’s Fellow, Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics, Cornell University

Sharif Hozoori, Visiting Scholar, South Asia Program & IIE-SRF Fellow

Maryam Amini, Global Development, Cornell CALS

Moderator

Sabrina Karim, Hardis Family Assistant Professor for Teaching Excellence, Associate Director, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

A conversation with Nishant Batsha and Durba Ghosh (History, Cornell University).

On a small Pacific island, a brother and sister tune in to a breaking news radio bulletin. It is 1985, and an Indian grocer has just been attacked by nativists aligned with the recent military coup. Now, fear and shock are rippling through the island’s deeply-rooted Indian community as racial tensions rise to the brink. Bhumi hears this news from her locked-down dorm room in the capital city. She is the ambitious, intellectual standout of the family—the one destined for success. But when her friendship with the daughter of a prominent government official becomes a liability, she must flee her unstable home for California. Jaipal feels like the unnoticed, unremarkable sibling, always left to fend for himself. He is stuck working in the family store, avoiding their father’s wrath, with nothing but his hidden desires to distract him. Desperate for money and connection, he seizes a sudden opportunity to take his life into his own hands for the first time. But his decision leaves him at the mercy of an increasingly volatile country. Spanning from the lush terrain of the South Pacific to the golden hills of San Francisco, Mother Ocean Father Nation is an entrancing debut about how one family, at the mercy of a nation broken by legacies of power and oppression, forges a path to find a home once again.

Nishant Batsha is a writer of fiction and histories. He is the author of the 2022 novel Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins). He is currently at work on A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart (Ecco/HarperCollins, February 2025), a novel set between California and New York at the dawn of World War I. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University, as well as a master's from the University of Oxford (on a Doctorow Fellowship and ESU-SF Scholarship) and an undergraduate degree from Columbia. His academic research focused on Indian indentured labor in Trinidad and Fiji. Nishant's writing has been supported by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Prelinger Library, as well as fellowships such as the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Books will be available for sale, and signing, after the conversation.

Talk by Kalyani Devaki Menon

In today’s India where we see the ascendance of Hindu supremacy, the increasing hegemony of upper-caste Hindu norms, escalating violence against religious minorities, and rising authoritarianism, the place for Muslims is shrinking. However, while these forces marginalize Muslims and threaten their place in contemporary India, they are not totalizing. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, I examine how religion provides one arena for Muslims to intervene in the political and counter the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right in India. The religious practices of Old Delhi’s Muslims imbue localities with particular cultural inflections and can be seen as modes of making place. Focusing on tensions that emerged between different groups of Muslim women over mourning rituals in Old Delhi, I explore how they not only index diverse constructions of ideal religious subjectivity, but also illustrate how Old Delhi’s diverse Muslim communities negotiate difference and construct belonging in contemporary India. In so doing, I analyze how rituals of death are also very much about life, providing an arena for Old Delhi’s Muslims to variously make place for themselves in India today.

Kalyani Devaki Menon is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Her research focuses on religious politics in contemporary India. Her first book, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2010. Her new book, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.

Professor Kristen Harkness will discuss her book When Soldiers Rebel: Ethnic Armies and Political Instability in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2018). The book argues that the processes of creating and dismantling ethnically exclusionary state institutions engender organized and violent political resistance. This explains both the motivations and timing of rebellion: while exclusionary institutions and group grievances may persist over many years, it is in brief and rare intervals that entire systems of ethnic privilege and disadvantage are created or destroyed.

Focusing on African militaries and when soldiers rebel against the state on ethnic grounds, it is shown that when leaders attempt to build ethnic armies, or dismantle those created by their predecessors, they provoke violent resistance from military officers. This poses a deep challenge to democratization, which has brought new leaders to power who threaten Africa’s legacy of ethnic armies.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Dr. Kristen A. Harkness is a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Her research focuses on understanding how ethnicity shapes the loyalty and behavior of military institutions in Africa and has been funded by the British Academy.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Institute for African Development and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.