Under what conditions do positive price shocks facilitate cycles of crime and violence? While extant literature posits that positive shocks in licit industries will decrease crime and violence, evidence for this outcome is often taken from contexts with at least nominal levels of state capacity. I challenge these expectations using evidence from Madagascar, which is characterized by extremely low state capacity, and the rapid increase in vanilla prices following an abrupt shift away from synthetic vanilla by several multinational companies.

Ethnic minorities make contemporary Europe increasingly diverse. The wisdom in research on ethnicity is that it is a trouble-maker disrupting programmatic politics, prioritizing group identity over ideology, polity over policy, principle over compromise. In this book, Jan Rovny approaches ethnic politics as normal politics, and investigates the ideological potential of ethnicity. He shows that ethnic minorities often search for group preservation by championing liberal rights that would protect them from the tyranny of the majority.

[joint work with Sofía Breitenstein and Enrique Hernández]

Why do some people support redistributive policies? And why, depending on the level of redistribution provided, do some engage in crime while others choose to invest in policing as a response to inequality? Using a novel survey and lab experiment, this presentation aims to explore four main arguments.

Sandipto Dasgupta will speak on his book, Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony. Following decolonization, the challenge was to give institutional form to the varied and ambitious ideas of freedom generated by the anticolonial struggles. Through an original and comprehensive account of India’s anticolonial movement and constitution making, Legalizing the Revolution explores the unique promises, challenges, and contradictions of that task.

Hate crime laws, which criminalise violent expressions of prejudice, have faced growing criticism. Scholars have argued that hate crime legislation relies on the collaboration of legal institutions that are themselves shaped by histories of prejudice and fail to bring justice to survivors of identity-based violence. But what does it mean for a hate crime law to be successful? And to whose vision of justice are hate crime laws accountable?

Lower caste assertion in colonial India has been a topic of critical interest for several researchers in the recent past. The Satyashodhak Movement (Truth-Seeking movement) spearheaded by Jotirao Phule in 1873 is one such important movement. However, this movement has largely been studied in a teleological manner, from its birth as a social movement in 1873, to its culmination into a political party in 1920. In this presentation, I will argue that the ideological currents of the Satyashodhak variant of non-Brahmanism underwent seismic shifts after 1890.

Imran Khan, Pakistan's former Prime Minister (2018-2022) and candidate for Chancellor, University of Oxford 2024, remains a populist figure despite his conservatism and limited achievements. His female supporters have courageously faced jail time, representing a postfeminist politics tied to Khan’s narrative of Islamic sovereignty, victimhood, nationalism, and piety.

'Being Hindu, Being Indian' undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through his active political life, spanning 1888 and 1928. Contesting the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalism as the precursor of Savarkarite Hindutva, it highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu nationalism’. An examination of Lajpat Rai's thought as a Hindu Mahasabha in the mid-1920s reveals that Rai organised a Hindu politics in service of a secular Indian nation-state.