South Asia is experiencing rising authoritarianism. The targets of right-wing movements are progressive forces who are increasingly viewed as outsiders threatening the imagined purity of the nation. The label of “foreign agent” is now widely invoked against political opponents who are accused of sedition. The sedition law was formulated and used by the British against anti-colonial activists. On the other hand, popular sovereignty was established in confrontation with Empire, creating an insurgent and rebellious conception of “the people”.

As someone who is under trial for sedition in Lahore, I witnessed how this law became a weapon in the hands of the state to silence internal dissent. Today, it is being used against academics, journalists, students and trade unionists to suppress critical voices. Contestations over the meaning of sedition and patriotism are at the heart of political struggles in contemporary Pakistan.

I explore three consequences for political theory emanating from discussions on sedition. First, I argue that foreignness does not denote geographical belonging but is a metaphor to describe those exceeding the normative frameworks of power. Second, the category of the internal “enemy” always maintained a subterranean existence in liberal political theory. This repressed history of violence and erasure becomes central for understanding politics in Pakistan. Finally, the criminalizing of dissent and dismantling of popular power impacts our understanding of sovereignty. The permanent state of emergency in Pakistan not only targets the category of “the people” but also undermines the concept of the sacred in the country’s polity, triggering a crisis of legitimation for the state.

Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and activist based in Lahore. He completed his Masters from the University of Chicago and his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research was titled “A Study of Communist Thought in Colonial India, 1919-1951” in which he examined the relationship between European and anti-colonial political thought. Instead of viewing the non-European world as a passive recipient of European ideas, this work showed how political actors in the colonial world reframed the contours of modern political theory as a response to specific questions emanating from anti-colonial struggles.

Upon his return to Pakistan in 2016, Jan began teaching in public sector universities, became involved in the student and trade union movement, and started writing a weekly column for The News International. He was eventually fired from his position and charged with sedition as part of a crackdown against dissenting voices. Currently he is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (People’s Rights Movement), Cabinet Member of the Progressive International and does a weekly show on NayaDaur. His forthcoming book is titled Rule by Fear: Eight Thesis on Authoritarianism in Pakistan.

The ill-fated American invasion in Afghanistan came to an abrupt end with the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover of Kabul in mid-August. Images of the chaos that ensued as the U.S. and other NATO countries attempted to evacuate tens of thousands of people continue to play out on television screens around the world.

The collapse of the Afghan security forces in days and the withdrawal of European and American government personal left many Afghans vulnerable to the new regime’s policies and their future of the country in doubt. Much airtime has been devoted to analyzing this crisis in terms of American and European interests, yet we have learned little about how Afghans who have worked to rebuild their country’s institutions are faring, how they envision their future, and how the international community can help to secure a secure and prosperous future for all Afghans.

In this webinar, we ask two Afghan scholars to reflect on the state of their country, what they see taking place in the near and long terms, and possible ways to achieve a future they envision for their country.

Panelists:

Muska Dastageer is a political scientist specializing in peace and political theory. She is a lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in Kabul, Afghanistan. Alongside her lecturing, she is also an Expert Advisor on the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Dialogues on Afghanistan.Up until December 2020 she also worked as a special anti-corruption advisor with the Joint Taskforce for Anti & Counter Corruption (JTACC). Prior to this she advised the USAID-funded Afghanistan's Measure for Accountability and Transparency (AMANAT) program and the Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, delivering several damning institutional assessments of ministries in Kabul in 2018 and 2019. She holds two MSc degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Copenhagen. Her articles on the Afghan peace process and security in South Asia have been published by the Atlantic Council, The Diplomat and RÆSON and has participated in panels arranged by Brookings Institution and the Atlantic Council.

Haroun Rahimi obtained his B.A. in Law from Herat University, his LLM in Global Business Law from the University of Washington School of Law, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Rahimi is Assistant Professor of Law at the American University of Afghanistan. Rahimi's research focuses on economic laws, institutional reform, and divergent conceptions of rule of law in the Muslim and modern thoughts. Rahimi's research has appeared in reputable local and international journals. Rahimi has also collaborated as an independent consultant with a number of research firms and policy think tanks conducting policy research on institutional development and good governance in the South Asia context. Most recently, at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Rahimi worked on the legal history of Afghanistan and the ways that legal transplantation is legitimized in Muslim countries.

Moderator:

Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history and the director of the Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies, Cornell University. He is the author of The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016) and several other publications on Ottoman imperialism in Africa. He held several fellowships over the past few years, including the Alfred Howell Chair in Archeology and History at the American University of Beirut in 2019-20 and was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central European University in 2020-21.

This session will provide PhD students with information on the Einaudi Dissertation Proposal Development Program. The program offers seminars, workshops, and faculty mentoring to PhD students in the social sciences and humanities who are developing research projects abroad or domestic research projects on topics that connect to global issues. Students receive up to $5,000 for summer research. Workshop and seminar costs are also covered.

Contact: programming@einaudi.cornell.edu

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months. Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu

The Pulse of Art History Lecture Series

This talk presents a close analysis of a Persian text (1760-61CE) in praise of the Maklī necropolis in Sindh, now in modern-day Pakistan. I discuss the intertwining of Ṣufī beliefs with emotions and movement and sociability. The act of walking serves as a critical method for experiencing the sacrality of Maklī, not simply as a mode of reaching holy sites and following pilgrimage itineraries, but rather as an embodied experience that could enact significant emotional transformation upon the feeling subject. This research highlights the rich possibilities that poetic texts hold for excavating the affective dimensions of urban and funerary spaces in premodern South Asia.

Fatima Quraishi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Her current book project Necropolis as Palimpsest: The Makli Cemetery in Sindh, 1380-1660 is a longue-duree analysis of a vast funerary site in the south of Pakistan.

The event is only open to the Cornell community.

Is the Einaudi Center's International Relations minor for you? Here's a chance to find out. Graduates go on to successful careers in fields like international law, economics, agriculture, trade, finance, journalism, education, and government service.

Contact: irm@einaudi.cornell.edu

The migration studies minor is a university-wide, interdisciplinary undergraduate minor that prepares students to understand the historical and contemporary contexts and factors that drive international migration and shape migrant experiences around the globe. This minor draws on the rich course offerings found across the humanities and social sciences at Cornell, and is designed to draw students outside of their major fields and to extend their knowledge beyond a single country.

Contact: migration-minor@einaudi.cornell.edu,

This talk charts out an oceanic microhistory, grounded in the voyages of a dhow from the port of Kuwait, captained by the nakhoda ‘Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. It anchors itself in Al-Failakawi’s logbook, and looks out from the deck of the dhow onto a world of texts, letters, accounts, and other writings by nakhodas. The texts they wrote give us a sense of how nakhodas braided together past and present as they moved around the Indian Ocean; the routes they traversed bore the sediments of a long history of trade and empire. By writing from the deck of the dhow, we can gather histories that have been scattered along the coasts of Arabia, South Asia, and East Africa; we gain a sharper sense of how actors understood this world of circulation and inscribed it into their voyages.

**Co-sponsored with the South Asia Program

This talk inserts the Omani sultans and their royal household into the Arabian Sea world to shift the focus away from the histories of imperial hegemony and capitalist expansion that dominate its historiography. It analyzes princely careers as they evolved drawing from multiple contexts that were accessed by the excessive mobility of the protagonists, both overseas and over land. It views the Western Indian Ocean as a wide canvas for Omani careering in which the Sultans remained entangled in imperial networks and translated Western obsessions -- likely slavery and radical Islam -- making them locally legible.

This paper is an attempt to understand how, what counts as “violence,” and what does not, emerges in a given society. Groups in post-1990s Sri Lanka, particularly those led by monks, engage in and authorize a “new” monastic discourse in which they demand state sovereign power. These groups and their political actions – hunger strikes, protests, and hostility towards minority communities, especially Muslims – are able to disable the state order. However, these acts are rarely considered “violent” by the majority of Sinhalese Buddhists. In this paper, Dharmasinghe analyzes how the actions of some monks come to be interpreted or glossed as not-violence in the Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian tradition in Sri Lanka. It is her contention that the Sinhala Buddhist tradition serves as a legitimizing frame for the monks' authority as a force in Sri Lanka. Dharmasinghe's ethnographic materials are gathered from Sri Lanka, but she argues that this work’s relevance goes beyond places where the Theravada Buddhist tradition triumphs.

Geethika Dharmasinghe, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. With the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Dharmasinghe finished her field work in Sri Lanka in 2019. The larger question that hovers over her dissertation concerns the relationship of “Buddhists” to “violence.” It examines the conditions of possibilities for the emergence of Buddhist violence located outside of state control yet indebted to post-colonial avowedly secular electoral procedures, claiming premodern precedent for activities supported by a neo-liberal economic order. .