NZIRI Webinar Series
Webinar I: India’s Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Managing or Mangling a Crisis?
Professor Sumit Ganguly in conversation with Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Dr Manjeet Pardesi.
19 May, Tuesday 2020, 09.00-10.00 AM
Speaker Bio: Sumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor in Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. A specialist on the international and comparative politics of South Asia he has written extensively in both areas. His most recent book (with William R. Thompson) is Ascending India and Its State Capacity (Yale University Press, 2017). He is currently writing book under contract with Columbia University Press that traces the origins and evolution of India’s defense policies. He is also the editor of a new refereed, open access, Policy Studies Organization journal, Indian Politics and Policy.
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Webinar II: Are We One? Unmasking Kiwi-Indian Exclusion
Associate Professor Jacqueline Leckie in conversation with Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Director, NZIRI) and Ms Manisha Morar, General Secretary (New Zealand Indian Central Association).
27 May, Wednesday 2020, 4.00-5.00 PM
Speaker Bio: Associate Professor Jacqueline Leckie is an Adjunct Research Fellow with the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, and a Conjoint Associate Professor, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research is on the history and anthropology of Asia-Pacific, and several publications have been on the Indian diaspora. In 2018 she was the J. D. Stout Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington. Her books include Colonizing Madness: Asylum and Community in Fiji (2020), A University for the Pacific: 50 Years of USP (2018), Indian Settlers. The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community (2007), To Labour with the State (1997); editing Development in an Insecure and Gendered World (2009); co-editing Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific (2016), Asians and the New Multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (2015), Localizing Asia in Aotearoa (2011), Recentring Asia (2011) and Labour in the South Pacific (1990).
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Webinar III: An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876
3 June, Wednesday 2020, 4.00-5.00 PM
Speaker Bio: Benjamin Kingsbury was born in Auckland in 1987, and brought up in New Zealand and Pakistan. Since then he has lived in both India and Bangladesh. He completed an MA in History at the University of Canterbury and received his PhD degree from Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author of An Imperial Disaster: The Bengal Cyclone of 1876 (Hurst & Co. and Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Dark Island: Leprosy in New Zealand and the Quail Island Colony (Bridget Williams Books, 2019). He has taught history at Victoria University of Wellington and now works as a historian for the New Zealand government.
Webinar IV: COVID-19 -- will India “dodge the bullet”?
Associate Professor Arindam Basu (University of Canterbury) in conversation with Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Director, NZIRI) and Associate Professor Sita Venkateswar (Massey University).
10 June, Wednesday 2020, 4.00-5.00 PM
Speaker Bio: Arindam Basu is a surgeon, an epidemiologist, and a population health data scientist. He is the Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University of Canterbury School of Health Sciences. Before moving to New Zealand, he directed The US NIH Fogarty grant funded training programme for training environmental epidemiology in India at Kolkata for seven years. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications, books, presentations, and non-peer-reviewed popular press publications on environmental and clinical epidemiology, and is also a collaborator for the global burden of disease project, and a chairperson of the Telehealth Working group of the International Medical Informatics Association. He researches the interface of genetic and environmental health (gene-environment interactions) and how they impact health services utilisation and access to primary care.
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Webinar V: Borders of an Epidemic: Covid-19 and Migrant Workers
Professor Ranabir Samaddar (Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at Calcutta Research Group) discussed his recent edited book, Borders of an Epidemic: Covid-19 and Migrant Workers (2020) with Professor Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Director, NZIRI) and Associate Professor Douglas Hill (University of Otago).
24 June, Wednesday 2020, 4.00-5.00 PM
Speaker Bio: Prof. Ranabir Samaddar currently holds a Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies at Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. He belongs to a school of thought signalling a new turn in critical postcolonial thinking. Among his influential works are: The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (Sage, 1999), Refugees and the State (Sage, 2003), Emergence of the Political Subject (Sage, 2009), The Nation Form: Essays on Indian Nationalism (Sage, 2012), His latest work is Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).
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Webinar VI: Kalimpong Kids, The New Zealand Story
22 July, Wednesday 2020, 4.00-5.00 PM
Speaker Bio: Jane McCabe is a Melbourne-based historian. In 2007 she travelled to Kalimpong to try to uncover details of her grandmother's hushed Indian heritage. There she discovered an organised Presbyterian mission scheme, which resettled 130 Anglo-Indian (mixed-race) children in New Zealand in the early 20th century. Several years later Jane began a PhD at the University of Otago to examine the scheme. The thesis was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2017 as Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement, and won two national history prizes. Jane then embarked on a collaborative project with Kalimpong descendants all over New Zealand to compile a visual history of this extraordinary story. This has culminated in her recent publication with Otago University Press, Kalimpong Kids: The New Zealand Story, in pictures. From 2014 to 2019 Jane taught South Asian, Migration and Global History at the University of Otago. She is currently writing the monograph from her recently completed Marsden-funded project: a cross-cultural study of land and inheritance in rural families in Taieri and Hokianga.
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Webinar VII: India’s Foreign Economic Policy under Modi: Negotiations and Narratives in the WTO and Beyond
Prof. Amrita Narlikar (President, German Institute for Global and Area Studies and Professor, Hamburg University) delivered a public lecture on India's Foreign Policy under Modi.
6 August, Thursday, 2020 from 7.00-8.00 PM
Lecture Abstract: For all the complexities of India’s politics, Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemed to have his economic path cut out for him. His “Achche din aane waale hein” campaign, which had won him a resounding election victory in 2014 for his first term, suggested that Modi’s primary goal was growth and development for his country and people, and hence also an agenda of economic reform. Focusing specifically on India’s negotiations in the context of the WTO, I show in this paper that India has continued to hold on to its former trade policy priorities and negotiation positions and adopted
even more hard-line positions in some cases. Interestingly though, the same policy priorities and negotiation patterns that had ill-served India in the past, may now no longer be a liability. This is only in part a credit to the Modi administration per se. Rather, it is mainly due to the rise of the phenomenon of Weaponized Interdependence, which in turn legitimizes – sometimes even necessitates – the securitization of foreign economic policy, and more specifically, trade politics. Taken in this changing context and if it plays its cards right, India’s historic and oft reviled caution in opening up its markets and reluctance to integrate in global value chains, may yet allow it to have the last laugh.
Speaker Bio: Prof. Amrita Narlikar is the President of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and Professor at Hamburg University. She is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. Amrita’s research expertise lies in the areas of multilateralism, international negotiation, WTO, and rising powers. Her most recent book has been published by Cambridge University Press (Poverty Narratives in International Trade Negotiations and Beyond, New York: CUP, 2020). Her previous books include: Bargaining with a Rising India: Lessons from the Mahabharata (co-authored) Oxford: OUP, 2014
and The Oxford Handbook on the World Trade Organization (co-edited) Oxford: CUP, 2012. For further details, please see: https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/team/narlikar
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Webinar VIII: Paper Trails: Foreigner’s Tribunals and Indian citizenship in Assam
Dr. Malini Sur, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University delivered a lecture on Foreigner’s Tribunals and Indian citizenship in Assam.
27 August, Thursday, 2020 from 4 PM to 5 PM
Webinar IX: Modi’s China Strategy-Managing an Asymmetric Rivalry
Dr Manjeet Pardesi, Senior Lecturer in the Political Science and International Relations Programme and Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington will deliver a talk on, 'Modi’s China Strategy-Managing an Asymmetric Rivalry.' Associate Professor Jason Young (Director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre and Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, VUW) will acted as the commentator on the talk.
23 September, Wednesday, 2020 4 PM to 5PM
Lecture Abstract: India’s strategy towards China under Modi needs to be understood as the approach of a rising power (in Asia) that has been in relative decline vis-à-vis China. Consequently, Modi’s India has adopted a mixed strategy towards its asymmetric rival China that includes accommodation/cooperation at the multilateral level (e.g., the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), competition at the regional level (in the Indo-Pacific), rejection of China’s unilateral initiatives (such as the Belt and Road Initiative), and deterrence (along the Himalayas and in the Indian Ocean). This seemingly inchoate issue-based approach is function of material and ideational factors. In addition to safeguarding its sovereignty and territorial integrity, India aims to prevent Chinese hegemony in Asia while creating strategic space for itself as a great power in a multipolar Asia. However, India lacks a viable strategy to compete/catch-up with China economically, and therefore India’s overall response will be a constant challenge for its diplomacy.
Speaker Bio: Manjeet S. Pardesi is Senior Lecturer in the Political Science and International Relations Programme and Asia Research Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include international relations in global history, great power politics, strategic rivalries, Asian security, and Indian foreign policy. He is currently the Managing Editor of the journal Asian Security (since June 2018). He is a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security (Oxford, 2018) and India’s Military Modernization: Challenges and Prospects (Oxford, 2014). His articles have appeared in several journals including European Journal of International Relations, Security Studies, Survival, Asian Security and in several edited book volumes.
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Webinar X: Water, Infrastructure and Vernacular Governance: Calculating Potential, Wasting Alternatives
Associate Professor Douglas Hill (Developmental Studies, School of Geography, University of Otago) delivered a talk on, Water, Infrastructure and Vernacular Governance: Calculating Potential, Wasting Alternatives.
30 October, Friday, 2020 4pm to 5pm
Lecture Abstract: In contemporary India, proponents of neoliberalism deploy a range of calculative practices to depoliticise contentious development issues and argue for their resolution as a technical matter to be effectively managed by experts. In the case of the utilisation of transboundary water resources for power, irrigation and flood control, these calculative practices include: social and environmental Impact Assessments; donor-facilitated studies of economic productivity and energy trading; and inventories of renewable energy targets for the country’s international commitment towards a low carbon transition. In the orthodox approach to examining the development of eastern South Asia, the creation and deployment of these regimes of knowledge creates a schema by which trade-offs can be seen to be made on an objective basis. By privileging certain kinds of knowledges, such as those produced by engineers, hydrologists, security intellectuals, and energy economists, these calculative practices also co-opt or silence dissenting voices and foreclose on alternative understandings of what development could mean for the Brahmaputra basin. These closures are intensified by the securitisation of transboundary water, as part of a perceived zero-sum game with the PRC over hydropower, as well as donor-led regional initiatives for infrastructure development and trade liberalisation throughout eastern South Asia and beyond.
In this paper, contemporary drivers of neoliberal development in Northeast India are analysed through a consideration of how transboundary water resources are discursively constructed and materially contested across time and space. At the same time, the paper argues for an alternative conception of state practices at a variety of scales. It does this by using the example of large-scale dam development to assert the necessity of distinguishing between, on the one hand, guidelines or regulations for promoting human security and environmental sustainability, and on the other hand, the actual practices carried out on the ground. The paper argues these divergences between policy and implementation are not accidental or due to a lack of state capacity but rather inherent in the tactical, vernacular practices of water resources bureaucracies.
Speaker Bio: Douglas Hill is an Associate Professor of Development Studies, School of Geography, University of Otago. He has published extensively on development issues in South Asia, including a number of studies on transboundary water resources.
Find the webinar recording here.