Book talk by Shani Rohit De (History, Yale University) and Ornit Shani (Asian Studies, University of Haifa)

In this paradigm-shifting history, Rohit De and Ornit Shani re-examine the making of the Indian constitution from the perspective of the country's people. In a departure from dominant approaches that foreground the framing of the text within the Constituent Assembly, they instead demonstrate how it was shaped by diverse publics across India and beyond. They reveal multiple, parallel constitution-making processes underway across the subcontinent, highlighting how individuals and groups transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle and a tool for transformation. The book presents a rich tapestry of these interactions, describing how many of the 500 princely states adopted constitutional documents establishing forms of representative government; discussing the contributions received by the Constituent Assembly from associations of women, Dalits, upper and lower castes, and religious groups of every faith and denomination; outlining the contributions from provincial legislatures, the judiciary and the civil service, and finally reviewing the important demands made by some tribal communities. De and Shani argue that the deep sense of ownership the public assumed over the constitution became pivotal to the formation, legitimacy, and endurance of India's democracy against arduous challenges and many odds. In highlighting the Indian case as a model for thinking through constitution-making in plural societies, this is a vital contribution to constitutional and democratic history.

Rohit De is an Associate Professor of History at Yale University and a historian of South Asia and the British common law world. He is the author of A People's Constitution: The Everyday Law in the Indian Republic (2018).

Ornit Shani is an Associate Professor in the history of India’s democracy and South Asia politics at the University of Haifa and is the Henry Hart Rice Visiting Professor at Yale University in Spring 2025. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise (2018)

Talk by Ateya Khorakiwala (Architecture, Columbia University)

What architectural technologies were deployed in response to colonial famine? A history of food is, at its most radical, a history of the production of poverty as a systematic condition and an institutional discourse. This paper seeks to locate famine and starvation, not as a colonial event of economic neglect, but rather as a central methodology of extracting labor knowledge from the bodies of colonial subjects. Focusing on the two famines that took place in quick succession in colonial Punjab in 1896 and 1899, this paper looks at two types of documents: the Punjab Famine Code and the Famine Commission Reports. Both documents outline how famine camps and relief works were deployed to manage populations affected by food scarcity. The famine camp and the relief work are two architectural embodiments of famine epistemology. Both typologies claimed to be humanitarian interventions towards famine relief, but were instead, this paper argues, methods of extracting knowledge from the bodies of rural laborers. Knowledge such as: how little grain did a person need to survive? What minimum quantity of grain enabled a person to still labor? How bad did starvation conditions need to be before a landowner worked alongside a peasant? In this way, the Revenue Department used architectural technologies to produce a racialized, gendered, and caste-based epistemology of famine. This paper aims to argue that architectural thought on minimum space and famine thought on minimum sustenance share an infernal history that manifests in relief works where technologies of policing the rural poor were perfected.

Ateya Khorakiwala is a historian of modernity in its colonial and postcolonial guises in South Asia and of the aesthetics and materiality of its postcolonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes. Her current book project, Famine Landscapes, is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India’s postcolonial countryside. The book shows how infrastructures of the developmental decades can be traced back to colonial famine policies, physiocratic theories of land management, and utilitarian theories of governance, even as these architectural interventions emerge in a contested field of Cold War techno-scientific thinking. She is also researching the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo, and plastic. Khorakiwala has received grants and fellowships from the MacDowell Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the American Institute of India Studies. Her essays and articles have appeared in e-flux Architecture, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Grey Room, and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). She coedited Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). Khorakiwala received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, her MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and was trained as an architect at KRVIA in Mumbai, India.

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.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

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

With the second Trump administration challenging the basic tenets of transatlantic relations, Europeans must find a way to contain the damage and chart a new path forward. Doing so successfully will require an understanding of the post-Cold War history of Europe, NATO, and Ukraine. In this lecture, Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, Director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, will highlight how this history illuminates the tensions between Europe and the United States today. Drawing on her award-winning book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, Sarotte will both illuminate how we got to where we are—and what might happen as American foreign policy enters an era of “magical realism.”

About the Speaker

Mary Elise Sarotte is the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy with a tenured joint appointment at the Yale School of Management. An expert in the history of international relations, she directs the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.

Professor Sarotte has held tenured faculty appointments at the University of Cambridge, the University of Southern California, and, most recently, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies or SAIS, where she was the inaugural holder of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professorship of Historical Studies.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies (IES), part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture is an annual event.

Amidst many proposals to incorporate AI into some aspect of the nuclear enterprise, many efforts are underway today to improve the safety of AI so that its introduction into any given part of the nuclear enterprise does not pose undue risk. Yet it does not seem possible to reduce the risks of such introduction to zero. Given that point of departure, this talk will address various criteria to that can help the cognizant individuals to make some kind of assessment for the risk associated with the incorporation of a particular AI application into some aspect of the nuclear enterprise.

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.

Host

Reppy for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

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.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor

Gender and the Security Sector Lab

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.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

When you follow the river, new constellations of the political come into view. This talk examines how rivers in Bosnia and Herzegovina become sites where the afterlives of war, the NATO‑brokered peace de/industrial complex, and global border regimes converge to produce fluvial necropolitics and new kinds of solidarities. Through three ethnographic scenes—military/industrial toxic dumping on the Neretva; refugee deaths and solidarities along the Serbian border on the Drina; and the lethal 2024 landslide on the Neretva—I show how rivers are simultaneously harmed, weaponized, and mobilized. Methodologically, I propose thinking from Bosnia, foregrounding a shared present that exceeds ethnic and national boundaries, and pairing ethnography with autoethnography to illuminate how people understand, endure, and resist the multi-scalar assaults on ecologies of living.

About the speaker

Saida Hodžić is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and the organizer of the Refugees Know Things project. Her book The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (2017) examines imperialism from the South. She studies and writes about the afterlives of war, dissent, survivance, and solidarity.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies