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SAI Event Topic : Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics

Representation from Below: How Women Mobilize in India’s Weak Party System

START
Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 11:00am

END
Fri, Apr 9, 2021 at 12:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Register here to join the webinar.

Tanushree Goyal is a fourth and final year PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Goyal is also an academy scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University. Starting in Fall 2022, she will join Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Affairs. Her research interests lie at the intersections of comparative politics, gender, and development with a regional focus in South Asia. Goyal’s dissertation uses natural, survey, and quasi-experiments to examine important questions in the field of representation and accountability and is set in the context of the World’s largest democracy: India. It shows how female politicians affect change by influencing intra-party politics in the context of India’s urban cities. Female politicians incorporate women as intermediaries and establish cross-electoral level networks to influence political campaigns and party decisions. This “representation from below” fundamentally alters party politics and democracy for good.


Policing and Gendered Cases in India

START
Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 11:00am

END
Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 12:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Nirvikar Jassal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. His research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict and hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Asian Survey and Journal of Asian Studies. He completed his PhD from the University of California—Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and New York City government.


Capacity Beyond Coercion: Regulatory Pragmatism and Compliance Along the India-Nepal Border

START
Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 11:00am

END
Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 12:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Susan L. Ostermann is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She completed her Ph.D. in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes.

Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodology, Ostermann seeks to understand why we sometimes see compliance with regulations in very unlikely places: those in which the state is weak and actors, be they individuals or organizations, have strong incentives to break the law. Her dissertation develops the concept of regulatory pragmatism to explain variation in strategies used by both the Nepali and Indian states to secure compliance with conservation, education and child labor regulations under challenging conditions.

While Professor Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding norms and how they change. Towards this end, she has published papers on inter-caste marriage and the role of skin color in Indian politics. Her current projects are designed to explore the historical roots of conservatism in Indian political thought, the development and expansion of the Indian Election Commission, and variation in sex-ratios throughout the subcontinent. She has also published work on the Indian bureaucracy, state capacity in South Asia, and the 2014 Indian general election.

Ostermann’s work has been published in Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Studies in Indian Politics and Law & Policy.


Weapons of the Weak: The Violent Consequences of Biased Technological Change

START
Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 11:00am

END
Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 12:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Aditya Dasgupta is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. He completed his PhD at Harvard University and was previously a postdoc at Stanford University.

Dasgupta’s research is in comparative politics, political economy, and political-economic history/development. He works in three areas: (i) the political economy of democratization; (ii) the role of technological change in political development; (iii) the development of state capacity. Much of his work is on rural India, including his book project on the political consequences of the green revolution. Dasgupta is also building a lab on the political economy of agriculture and rural societies (PEARS).

His articles appear in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Economic History, and International Organization and have received awards from the APSA Democracy and Autocracy and Science, Technology and Environmental Politics sections.


Gandhi’s Gift: Successful Mass Nonviolence and India’s Decolonization

START
Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 12:00pm

END
Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 01:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Register for the event: https://bit.ly/3ixS06q

Rikhil R. Bhavnani, Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, will discuss his latest work exploring the structures and history of non-violent civil disobedience during the Indian struggle for democratic self-rule.

In this presentation, Bhavnani will focus on his joint work with Stanford’s Sumitra Jha, which you can read here “Gandhi’s Gift”.

Rikhil R. Bhavnani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a faculty affiliate at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Elections Research Center and the Center for South Asia.

Professor Bhavnani’s research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation, the political economy of migration, and the political economy of development. His research is particularly concerned with causal identification, and is focused on South Asia. Bhavnani is the co-author, with Bethany Lacina, of a book on the backlash against within-country migration across the developing world, published by Cambridge University Press. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, World Politics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and other outlets.

Prior to starting at UW–Madison, Professor Bhavnani was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He has worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund, and received a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, and a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.

This seminar series is co-sponsored by the Watson Institute at Brown University, the MIT Center for International Studies, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

More Info: http://southasianpolitics.net/


Business, Voters, and Distributive Politics in Developing Democracies

START
Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 12:00pm

END
Fri, Dec 4, 2020

VENUE
Webinar

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Register for the event: https://bit.ly/32yhBGS

Gautam Nair, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, will explore the impact of business on developing democracies and inequality.

Gautam Nair is a a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is a faculty affiliate of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for International Development. His research is in comparative and international political economy, and focuses primarily on the politics of democracy and redistribution. He has been published in The Journal of Politics and International Organization. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Leitner Political Economy Program at Yale.

This seminar series is co-sponsored by the Watson Institute at Brown University, the MIT Center for International Studies, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

More Info: http://southasianpolitics.net/


Discrimination and Defiant Pride: How the Demand for Dignity Creates Slack for Poor Governance

START
Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 12:00pm

END
Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 01:30pm

VENUE
Webinar

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Register for the event: https://bit.ly/3iGc1YK

Incoming Assistant Professor of Government Mashail Malik will discuss how social identities shape and are shaped by political life.

Mashail Malik studies how social identities – such as ethnicity and class – both shape and are shaped by political life. Currently a Gerald J. Lieberman Fellow, a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellow, and a Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, Malik, will begin her appointment as Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University in fall 2021. Her dissertation project is centered on the politics of ethnicity in Karachi – Pakistan’s largest megacity. Her research agenda further includes topics on political violence, state repression, civil-military relations, and the intersection of identity and economic conflict.

Discussant: Steven Rosenzweig, Boston University

This seminar series is co-sponsored by the Watson Institute at Brown University, the MIT Center for International Studies, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

More Info: http://southasianpolitics.net/


De Facto Suffrage: A Field Experiment to Improve Women’s Turnout in Pakistan’s General Elections

START
Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 02:00pm

END
Fri, Apr 12, 2019

VENUE
CGIS South, S153
Harvard University

ADDRESS
CGIS South, S153
Harvard University
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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JOINT SEMINAR ON SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS SERIES

Sarah Khan, Postgraduate Associate, Yale MacMillan Center

Sarah Khan is a postgraduate associate at the Yale MacMillan Center. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and comparative politics, with a regional specialization in South Asia. In her work, she explores gender gaps in political preferences, and the barriers to women’s participation and substantive representation in Pakistan. Additionally, she explores questions related to the prevention of violence against women. Her research has been generously supported by grants from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) Governance Initiative, and the National Science Foundation.

Khan has worked with Ali Cheema, Shandana Mohmand, and Asad Liaqat to research potential pathways to increasing women’s voter registration and turnout in Pakistan, culminating in a paper entitled “Exercising Her Right: Civic and Political Action as Pathways for Increasing Women’s Turnout in Pakistan.” According to the team, “there is a large and persistent gender gap in voter registration and turnout in Pakistan, making for a heavily male-skewed electorate in all levels of Pakistani elections. This has implications both for the quality of democracy, and for women’s substantive representation in politics.”


Crisis and Credibility: The Politics of Ideas in India and Developing Democracies

START
Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 02:00pm

END
Fri, Feb 8, 2019

VENUE
CGIS South, S450

ADDRESS
CGIS South, S450
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA

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JOINT SEMINAR ON SOUTH ASIAN POLITICS SERIES

Dr. Bilal A. Baloch is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI), Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics and a Lecturer and Regional Director in South Asia, Middle East and North Africa at The Joseph H. Lauder Institute, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

At CASI, Bilal focuses on the political economy of government behavior in India and other developing democracies. Here, he is revising his doctoral dissertation, Crisis, Credibility, and Corruption: How Ideas and Institutions Shape Government Behavior in India, into a monograph. Bilal has presented academic papers at several international conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. In addition to his scholarly publications, his commentary has appeared in a number of outlets, including: The Guardian, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and The Hindu. (Source)

In this lecture, Bilal will go beyond the claim that ideas matter in Indian politics, and will identify which set of ideas, as well as how these ideas shape political behavior during a credibility crisis. He will examine two main credibility crisis moments in contemporary Indian history: that which led to the declaration of an internal emergency and suspension of civil liberties by the ruling Congress government in 1974-1975; and the crisis milieu which led to policy paralysis within the UPA government in 2011-2012. This argument draws upon over 120 interviews with state elites, including prime ministers, cabinet ministers, party leaders, senior bureaucrats, and others.


Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics Series: Is Nationalism a Democratic Resource? Evidence from India and Malaysia

START
Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 02:00pm

END
Fri, Feb 23, 2018

VENUE
Watson Institute at Brown University

ADDRESS
Watson Institute at Brown University
111 Thayer Street
Providence, RI

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As part of the Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics series, Dr. Maya Tudor will use evidence from India and Malaysia to discuss the origins of stable, democratic and effective states across the developing world.


Enfranchising Your Own? Experimental Evidence on Bureaucrat Diversity and Election Bias

START
Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 02:00pm

END
Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 04:00pm

VENUE
CGIS South, S153
Harvard University

ADDRESS
CGIS South, S153
Harvard University
1730 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics

Yusuf Neggers, Postdoctoral Fellow, Watson Institute, Brown University

Simon Chauchard, Assistant Professor of Government Department, Dartmouth College

Chair: Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Director of the Brown-India Initiative

Read the seminar paper.

Cosponsored with the Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Wat­son Insti­tute at Brown Uni­ver­sity, the Weath­er­head Cen­ter for Inter­na­tional Affairs, and the MIT Cen­ter for Interna­tional Studies

 


The Lessons Private Schools Teach: Using a Field Experiment to Understand the Effects of Private Schools on Political Behavior

START
Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 02:00pm

END
Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 04:00pm

VENUE
CGIS Knafel, K262
Harvard University

ADDRESS
1737 Cambridge Street
Cambridge MA 02138

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Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics

Emmerich Davies Escobar, Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard University Graduate School of Education 

Bryce Millett Steinberg, Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University

Chair: Ashutosh Varshney, Sol Goldman Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Director of the Brown-India Initiative

Cosponsored with the Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Wat­son Insti­tute at Brown Uni­ver­sity, the Weath­er­head Cen­ter for Inter­na­tional Affairs, and the MIT Cen­ter for Interna­tional Studies

Read the seminar paper.