Month: February 2018

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Wednesday, February 28, 2018
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Room 505
Washington, DC 20052

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a distinctively Leninist path to soft power. It depicts public opinion as a battlefield upon which a highly disciplined political struggle must be waged and won. This talk documents one aspect of that struggle: how the Party is leveraging its economic muscle and the technologies of the information age to sanitize the historical record and globalize its own competing narratives. The talk also illustrates the vulnerabilities introduced by our deepening digital dependence and the challenges we confront in safeguarding the integrity of our knowledge base.

About the speaker:

Glenn Tiffert, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan and UCLA, and currently serves on the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History. Glenn’s research interests center on 20th century China, particularly its experience of revolution. At the vanguard among scholars of modern Chinese legal history, he has published works in English and Chinese on the construction of the modern Chinese court system and judiciary, the drafting of the 1954 PRC Constitution, the legacies of Nationalist judicial modernization to the PRC, and the hidden genealogy of current PRC legal policy. Glenn is also pioneering the integration of computational methods drawn from data science into the study of Chinese history. Using China as an illustrative case, his latest research empirically documents the alarming synergies between digitization, intellectual property law, censorship, and authoritarianism, and exposes how emerging technologies could spur Orwellian manipulation of the historical record and memory on a global scale.

Monday, March 26, 2018
12:00 PM – 1:45 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Room 505
Washington, DC 20052

Join us for a discussion on civil society, state repression and mobilization in contemporary China with Diana Fu, author of “Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China.”

About the speaker:

Diana Fu is an assistant professor of Asian Politics at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include contentious politics and social movements, Chinese politics, qualitative methods and ethnography, international development, and labor and gender politics. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Dr. Fu was a Rhodes Scholar studying Development Studies at Oxford University, graduating with both a Masters and PhD. Her research has appeared in Reuters, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, the Boston Review, Nick Kristof’s On the Ground Blog, PostGlobal, Global Brief, and has been part of projects such as Governance, Comparative Political Studies and The China Journal. Her book Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China theorizes a new pathway of civil society mobilization in contemporary China.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052

The creation of the state of Pakistan in 1947 was sudden and unexpected. Several details including the new international boundary lines, the accession of princely states, the division of the British Indian army, the choice of a national flag and appropriate national anthem, had to be worked out. The framing of a Constitution was among the foremost challenges facing the new state. In less than three decades, Pakistan would have as many Constitutions; common to all of these was the Objectives Resolution.

Passed in March 1949 by the first Constituent Assembly, which was also Pakistan’s first legislature, the Objectives Resolution is generally understood as marking the beginning of the Islamization of laws and society. Yet, the Resolution was embraced by non-Muslims, especially Christians, for safeguarding their right to preach and practice as Christians. A close examination of contemporary debates in the Constituent Assembly, the writings of religious scholars, law-makers and educationists throws new light on what it meant to be Muslim in Pakistan’s early decades, and for Pakistan to aspire to be an Islamic state. For both Muslims and non-Muslims, the Objectives Resolution was a challenge and a promise – a challenge to balance the contradictions and expectations inherent in the many clauses comprising the Resolution, and a promise to aspire to an equal and tolerant society “as enunciated by Islam.”

The lecture is part of my larger book project ‘Through Minority Eyes: Blasphemy Laws in South Asia.’

Agenda:

12:00 PM
Lunch

12:30 PM – 2:00 PM
Discussion with Dr. Neeti Nair – Asia Program Fellow at the Wilson Center, and Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia

About the speaker:

Neeti Nair: Educated in India and the United States, Neeti Nair is an associate professor at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on modern South Asian history and politics. She is the author of Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2011). Her articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals, including Modern Asian Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and the Economic and Political Weekly, as well as the Indian Express and India Today. Nair has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Mellon Foundation. She will be spending 2017-18 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars working on her next book project, Blasphemy: A South Asian History, which is to be published with Harvard University Press.