Temporariness and Belonging in a “free country”

In Malaysia, the incorporation of Nepali, mostly male, migrants as “foreign workers” has created the conditions within which they have come to see themselves as “foreigners” or just “workers” in “someone else’s place” (arkako thau). On the other hand, frequent references to Malaysia as a “free country”—where one can freely roam around and indulge in sex and alcohol unlike the Gulf where “one can’t even look a girl in the eye”; where people “forget” their country and family and “disappear” never to return; and where the hawapani (air and water) is, if not the same, better than Nepal—also signal forms of belonging. While these narratives reflect betrayal as an absent provider to both family and the nation, they also reflect failures and deviance from normative scripts and bounds of respectability and law and reveal a world of contestation, where ways of being otherwise exist not despite but through their particular predicaments as “foreign workers.” The talk examines this dual sense of exclusion and inclusion through which Nepali migrants experience work and life in Malaysia and asks what life-making and freedom might mean in a context of enforced temporariness.

Sampreety is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell.

Talk by Aniket Aga (Geography, University at Buffalo, SUNY)

Environmental regulation was among the chief reasons for the secular discrediting of the second Congress-led federal government under Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in India (2009–14) and the electoral victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This talk closely examines the politics of regulation in the environment ministry during the controversial tenure of the Congress-party leader Jayanthi Natarajan. By specifically examining negotiations around expert-panel reports, I argue that such reports serve both as policy manoeuvres and as a key form of knowledge in and for democracy. Because expert panels' reports embody state-sanctioned knowledge, they are critical vehicles for both the making and unmaking of democratic pressures, on the one hand, and constitutive of state topology, on the other. Ultimately, I suggest that diagnosing heterogeneous forms of knowledge and their negotiation is critical to advancing our conceptions of states and democracies, and key to analyzing how and when democracies collapse into authoritarian regimes.

Aniket Aga teaches at the Department of Geography, SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Fleck Best Book Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S). His research lies at the intersection of science and technology, development, and democracy. He collaborates with journalists and activists and has published in the Journal of Peasant Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Article14, among others.

Join us to learn about opportunities for graduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including research and travel grants, guest lectures, fellowships, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

In light of the war with Iran, Arang Keshavarzian's book talk will now be a roundtable discussion on recent events. This conversation will examine the war with Iran beyond the headlines, situating this latest outbreak of violence within broader historical, social, and regional contexts and debates.

The event is hosted by the Southwest Asia and North Africa Program (SWANA), part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and cosponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Panel

Arang Keshavarzian (Middle East Studies, New York University)Golnar Nikpour (History, Dartmouth College)Seema Golestaneh (SWANA director and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University)Moderator: Mostafa Minawi (History, Cornell University).

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About Arang Keshavarzian

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His research and teaching centers on questions of political economy of Iran and the wider Middle East. He has had a particular interest in the relationship between spatialization, capitalism, and political power. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (Cambridge UP, 2007) and co-editor, with Ali Mirsepassi, of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2021). His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2024). It is the recipient of the 2025 Roger Owen Prize from MESA for best book in economic history, economics, and political economy, as well as an honorary mention for the 2025 biannual book award from the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. His articles on various topics have appeared in several edited volumes as well as Politics & Society; International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics; Economy & Society; International Journal of Urban and Region Research, and Middle East Report.

Talk by Suvaid Yaseen (Asian Studies, Hamilton College)

The history of Muslim political thought in the disputed Kashmir region of South Asia has largely been narrated within the national frameworks of India and Pakistan, and often overdetermined by security concerns, especially when it comes to Islamic movements. This talk addresses the politics of the colonial and postcolonial archives regarding such Muslim actors and suggests alternative lines of inquiry. It reflects upon a range of literary materials produced by the intellectuals of Islamic movements in Kashmir. It proposes listening as a practice as well as a metaphor to question the hitherto employed analytical and narrative categories. In doing so, it examines the complexities of Islamic articulations in Kashmir on its own terms.

Suvaid Yaseen is a historian of South Asia with an interest in contested sovereignties, Islam, and intellectual history. He completed his PhD in History from Brown University and is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Asian Studies program at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

Nebula and Ursula K. Le Guin Award winning author Vajra Chandrasekera discusses his writing with Anindita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and Suman Seth, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science.

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His novels The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall have between them won Nebula, Le Guin, Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and Otherwise awards, been selected as New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and 2024, and been nominated for Dragon and Lamda Awards, among others. He is one of the 2025-2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times. He has worked as a fiction editor for Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, and as a contest judge for the Dream Foundry and the Salam Award. He is online at vajra.me and probably on whatever social media still exists at the time you’re reading this.

Books will be available for sale and signing after the lecture, from Odyssey Bookstore.

The Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell. Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year Laidlaw program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from twenty universities worldwide.

At this session, we'll share more information about the program, including independent international projects with the Einaudi Center’s trusted partners around the world for the summer 2026 leadership-in-action portion of the program, and tips for writing a successful application. Applications are due January 12, 2026.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.