Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone—it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. Bruce Dickson’s new book, The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping. Join us for a discussion with Alyssa Ayres, dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, and Bruce Dickson. This discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A session.

This event is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Elliott School Book Launch Series.

The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century is available from Princeton University Press. Use promo code BRDI for a 30% discount on the book until August 31, 2021!

Follow us on Youtube for the webinar recording! Access is also available for Dr. Dickson’s powerpoint presentation. 

Bruce Dickson received his B.A. in political science and English literature, his M.A. in Chinese Studies, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. He joined the faculty of The George Washington University and the Elliott School in 1993. Professor Dickson’s research and teaching focus on political dynamics in China, especially the adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party and the regime it governs. In addition to courses on China, he also teaches on comparative politics and authoritarianism. His current research examines the political consequences of economic reform in China, the Chinese Communist Party’s evolving strategy for survival, and the changing relationship between state and society. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the US Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. @GWUColumbian

Alyssa Ayres is Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. From 2013 to 2021, she was senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow. Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Her book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, was published in 2018. Ayres is also interested in the emergence of subnational engagement in foreign policy, particularly the growth of international city networks, and her current book project (working title, Bright Lights, Biggest Cities: The Urban Challenge to India’s Future, under contract with Oxford University Press) examines India’s urban transformation and its international implications. From 2010 to 2013, Ayres served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia. She received an AB from Harvard College and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. @AyresAlyssa

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for Public Diplomacy & Global Communication proudly host Wazhmah Osman, filmmaker and Professor at Temple University’s College of Media and Communication Studies, in the upcoming edition of the 2021 New Books in Asian Studies series to discuss her recently published Television and the Afghan Culture Wars Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists with Director Benjamin D. Hopkins, who will act as a moderator and discussant during the event.

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace.

This event is free, open to the public, and will be recorded. Questions can be sent in advance to gsigur@gwu.edu with subject “Afghan Culture Wars Q&A.”

Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists is available from University of Illinois Press (use F20UIP for 30% off!).

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies proudly hosts Thomas Simpson, Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, in the second edition of the 2021 New Books in Asian Studies series to discuss his recently published The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century with Director Benjamin D. Hopkins, who will act as a moderator and discussant during the event. 

Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks to historians of empire and science, anthropologists, and geographers alike.

The Frontier in British India provides the first connected and comparative analysis of frontiers in northwest and northeast India, and draws on visual and written materials from an array of archives across the subcontinent and the UK. Colonial interventions in frontier spaces and populations were, it shows, enormously destructive but also prone to confusion and failure on their own terms. British frontier administrators did not merely suffer ‘turbulent’ frontiers, but actively worked to generate and uphold these regions as spaces of governmental and scientific exception. Accordingly, India’s frontiers became crucial spaces of imperial practice and imagination throughout the nineteenth century.

This event is free, open to the public, and will be recorded. 

In this webinar, co-editors Celeste Arrington (George Washington University) and Patricia Goedde (Sungkyunkwan University) will introduce their new book Rights Claiming in South Korea (Cambridge University Press) with fellow chapter contributor Erin Chung (Johns Hopkins University). Sociologists Paul Chang (Harvard) and Hae Yeon Choo (University of Toronto) will discuss the edited volume’s findings and contributions to our understanding of rights-based activism in contemporary South Korea.

People in South Korea have defined and articulated diverse grievances as rights violations and engaged in claims-making to remedy them. In what institutional contexts do such rights claiming occur, and what sources of support are available for utilizing different claims-making channels? This edited volume illuminates rights in action by investigating how rights are interpreted and acted upon via petitions, court claims, protest, and other legal mobilization methods. Our research shows that rights claims are diversifying in Korea and opportunities and resources for rights claiming have improved. But obtaining rights protections and catalyzing social change remains challenging. Contributors from across the social sciences analyzed original interviews, court rulings and statutes, primary sources in archives and online, and news media coverage in Korean. The chapters uncover conflicts over contending rights claims, expose disparities between law on the books and law in practice, trace interconnections among rights and movements, and map emerging trends in the use of rights language. Case studies include women, workers, people with disabilities, migrants, and sexual minorities.

The book launch is co-sponsored by the GW Institute for Korean Studies and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and its speakers will represent three continents: we look forward to hosting a diverse audience to discuss rights claiming in this event.