Please find below the schedule of the Centre for the Study of Democracy Spring 2021 Seminar Series. Once you book yout ticket, a link to the talk will be sent to you closer to the date.

Tuesday 2nd February 4-5.30pm

Dr Jean-François Drolet (Queen Mary)

‘Radical Conservatism and Global Order’

This talk will draw on a research project on radical conservatism and global order that I have been working on with Professor Michael C. Williams from the University of Ottawa over the past three years or so. More specifically, it will reflect on a distinctively American articulation of radical conservative thought that goes by the name of ‘paleoconservatism’. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of right-wing thought has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces that have been challenging liberal orders since the mid-1980s. This includes the Tea Party, the Alt-Right, Trumpism and the European New Right.

Tuesday 9th February 5-6.30pm

Dr Shana Ye (University of Toronto)

'Queer Chimerica: Global China and the Political Economy of Ku'er'

What's the relationship between queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labor fluidity and flexibility? Queer theorization is often thought of as being originated from French poststructuralist critique of gender and sexual identities and US-based LGBT social movement. This talk traces a third genealogy of "queer" by examining the ways in which the production of queerness and the development of LGBT industry are inseparable of Cold War racial capitalism and labor precarity, exemplified by the post-Cold War interdependence of China and United States. Treating "queer" as a set of material relations of capital and labor mediated by geopolitics and affect, this talk argues that the maintenance of a Cold War divide is crucial to sustain the transnational “queer business” and to conceal inequality enabled by the alliance of democratic and authoritarian neoliberalism.

Friday 19th February 4.30-6pm

Albena Azmanova (University of Kent)

‘Thinking capitalism in the 21st century: the tasks of radical critique’

In her new book Capitalism on Edge Albena Azmanova observes that, while we have been discussing the crisis of capitalism in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form marked by the massification of insecurity. Precarity, rather than inequality, is what ails the 99 per cent, she claims. This alters the political diagnosis (populism is not populism), raises the stakes for progressive politics (fighting inequality is beside the point) and changes the rules of the game for radical critique (we can think systemic change without crisis, revolution, or utopia).

Tuesday 9th March, 5-6.30pm

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, Senior Lecturer International (Development) Studies, University of Portsmouth, UK / Senior Research Fellow, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS)

‘Engaging Sankara on the Ruins of Epistemicide: Discovering, Reporting and Teaching Thomas Sankara as Anticolonial Archive’

This paper is a collection of reflections on how we could engage Sankara as Anticolonial Archive (el-Malik and Kamola, 2017) and as/for wake work (Sharpe, 2017), for anticolonial knowledge making beyond personality cult, in a context of epistemicide (de Sousa Santos, 2014). An engagement with why he needed to be forgotten, who forgot and who not, and how he has been remembered, could point us in the direction of his dangerous, i.e. anticolonial, ideas and their stakes. This text offers three interventions: (1) I engage with my own discovery of the figure and ideas of Sankara to reflect on and illustrate epistemicide, as well as the places where the fissures are, i.e. there where the forgetting has not been successful; (2) I reflect on my journalistic attempt at curating and translating Sankara for a western audience – multidimensionally conceived – in the present, looking at pitfalls and opportunities (e.g. the need to frame him as the ‘African Che’ to make him readable in a context of profound colonial amnesia); (3) I explore Sankara’s words to (re-)think solidarity anticolonially, for the classroom and research agendas, zooming in on the idea of dignity (Agaciro) and the concrete case of Rwanda and the international aid context.

Weds 17 March, 2-3.30pm

Vineet Thakur (Universiteit Leiden)

‘Race, Caste and the Origins of Indian Diplomacy’

After the end of the First World War, India emerged a quasi-international actor. Counter-intuitively to how IR literature understands domestic and international sovereignty, India’s international status was widely understood to be a precursor to internal autonomy. In the 1920s, as India -- and indeed Indians -- participated in various international platforms, the racial ill-treatment of Indians overseas and their rights became the most crucial issue for Indian diplomacy.

In this talk that draws from my forthcoming diplomatic biography of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, I look at the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the early 1920s. Sastri was India’s roving ambassador in this period. The origins of Indian diplomacy, I argue, can only be understood through the intersection of three crucial identity and discursive markers: the commonwealth, race and – an issue that is never discussed in literature on Indian foreign policy – caste

Thursday 25th March 5-7pm

Máximo Sozzo (Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Argentina)

‘Southernizing” Criminology: Problems and Possibilities’

In recent years, expressions such as 'southern criminology', 'counter-colonial criminology' ‘decolonial criminology’ or 'postcolonial criminology' have occupied corners of the contemporary debate in this field of studies This discussion echoes a general debate within social sciences. Not all these expressions mean exactly the same and there are important distinctions among the different interventions. In this paper I try to produce a balance of what has been discussed, highlighting some key elements around which there is some sort of agreement and identifying the main points of disagreement and the different arguments that have been proposed in relation to them. Finally, I discuss the idea of “southenising” criminology as an interesting alternative to solve at least some – even if not all – these points of conflict, both politically and scientifically

The Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) is based in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Westminster. The Centre undertakes research across a range of critical social and political challenges, promoting an interdisciplinary environment that embraces colleagues from politics, international relations, sociology and criminology.