Shaharzad Akbar in conversation with Shazia Choudhry.
The strongest civil resistance to the drastic attacks on human rights and women’s rights in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in August 2021 comes from the Afghan women’s rights communities, internally and in exile. Shaharzad and Shazia will reflect on the struggle for women’s rights over the past two decades and the dilemmas for Afghan activists now.

Please visit this webpage for the Zoom link: https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/event/viral-politics-book-launch

Despite the market transformation in E. Asia's financial systems, regulators continue to employ hard paternalist approaches to their stock markets that are viewed as counterproductive to their development. Focusing on the Chinese stock market, this talk argues that the persistence of hard paternalistic regulatory practices can be explained by a regulatory vision – a common analytical framework to order complex uncertain environments that serve as regulatory first principles – centered on an irrational investor.

There is a discernible trend of secondary school students collectively attacking their schools with arson in Kenya. In her new book Burning Ambition, our seminar presenter Elizabeth Cooper makes the case that students deploy arson as moral punishment for perceived injustices and arson proves an effective tactic in their politics from below.

Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political thought of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book focusses on the Grand Old Man’s pre-occupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality. It shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline.