The Centre for the Study of Democracy and the Department of Politics and International Relations are organising a full programme of research seminars with visiting speakers this semester. Events will take place on Tuesdays 4-5.30pm, either online, or in the Westminster Forum, Level 5, 32-38 Wells street, University of Westminster, W1T 3UW. All are welcome to attend the seminars but registration is required.
Please note that for in person events, places are limited and will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis. For online events, once you book your ticket, a link to the talk will be sent to you closer to the date.
- ‘Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Implications for Democracy’ - Paola Rivetti (Dublin City University)
Tuesday 8 February, 3-5:30pm (online - note earlier start)
This talk will offer some preliminary reflections on the transformations of democracy as a system of norms and institutions which regulate the exercise of power. The analysis of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region sheds useful light on how models of democratic governance have been transforming, resonating transnationally. Building on the scholarship on regime types, democratic backsliding and centring the epistemological ruptures that the uprisings in the region have caused in the context of the debates among Area studies scholars, the goal of this paper is to highlight the important contribution that Area studies can make to disciplinary debates.
- ‘Border abolitionism: Migration, containment and the memory of struggles and rescue' - Martina Tazzioli (London Goldsmiths)
Tuesday 22 February 2022, 4-5:30pm (in-person)
This presentation develops a border abolitionist perspective to migration governmentality, with a specific focus on the confinement continuum that those racialised as “migrants” are subjected to. It starts by taking stock of the partially missed encounter between critical critical migration scholarship and carceral abolitionist literature. It shows that an abolitionist perspective enables tracing connections between interlocking forms of racialisation and, at the same time, building transversal alliances of solidarity. It moves on by challenging mechanisms of migration confinement beyond what Ruth Gilmore defined as “the politics of white innocence”. It concludes by interrogating what a critical knowledge of the border regime might mean in a context characterised by states’ blatant violations of the international law.
- ‘The Politics of Border Abolition: Temsula Ao and the Northeast Borderlands of India’ - Nivi Machanda (Queen Mary University)
Tuesday 8 March, 4-5:30pm (online)
This paper investigates the incursions of the Indian state into what are often called its ‘northeast borderlands’. It uses Temsula Ao’s ethnographic, political, and literary work to complicate understandings of both ‘the border’ and ‘intervention’. Ao is one of the most prominent writers of comtemporary Nagaland. Born when the Naga Hills were still administered by the British, Ao grew up when the Indian government drew ever more elaborate schemes to control and taxonomise the region, she has borne witness, in both her lived experienced and her scholarship, to the changing political landscape of the Naga Hills. Through a tarrying with Ao’s work, talk paper interrogates the multiple resonances of intervention – colonial, postcolonial, invasive, and cursory to explore the ways in which intervention is experienced, theorised and resisted in border regions.
- ‘Objectively justified: racial disparity as the inevitable consequence of criminal injustice’ - Patrick Williams (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Tuesday 22 March, 4-5:30pm (in-person)
- ‘Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy’ - Alexander Barder (Florida International University)
Tuesday 5 April, 4-5:30pm (online)
In this recently published book, Alexander Barder shows how specific racial imaginaries have, over the past two centuries, cut across politically defined state boundaries to legitimate practices of genocidal violence against so-called "enemy races." Barder traces the emergence of this global racial hierarchy from the early 19th century to the present to explain how a historical racial global order unraveled over the first half of the 20th century, continued during the Cold War, and reemerged during the Global War on Terror. Imperial, racial, and geopolitical orders intersected over time in ways that violently tore apart the imperial and sovereign state system and continue to haunt politics today. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities.
