Following a democratic transition, new political identities and cleavages can emerge or those repressed under autocracy can re-emerge. In new democracies, groups that were repressed often punish political actors associated with the ancien regime. Examining the first municipal elections after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, we find that tribal identities – marginalized under authoritarian rule – (re)emerged as a politically salient identity. Despite decades of policies designed to suppress tribes, our findings demonstrate that tribal identity influenced recent electoral politics.

Bio:
Richard is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. His research is on contemporary international approaches to peacemaking, and why peace processes fail or succeed, with a particular focus on Yemen, Sudan and South Sudan, and considering other examples.

Jointly convened with South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX).

Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine

A Times Literary Supplement book of the year 2024.

This book proposes a political history of Muslim universities in post-independence India, from 1947 to the 1990s. Based on a wide range of sources in English and in Urdu, it highlights the central role that these educational institutions played in the debates on national integration, secularism, minority rights and Muslim backwardness. After independence, Muslim universities found themselves at a critical juncture between central state authorities and India's Muslim population.

Drawing on thirty months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts of the South Indian state of Kerala, Plantation Crisis explores the collapse of the plantation system and the abandonment of its workforce during the recent crisis in the Indian tea economy. The colonial era plantation system in India – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation.

In the global imaginary of climate change, Bangladesh holds a prominent position. Frequently described as the ‘world’s most vulnerable country to climate change’, the specter of Bangladesh underwater, wiped off the map by rising seas, has given birth to a crisis narrative that obscures how interventions in the environment and social life of the country have already transformed the landscape many times over. Today, development in Bangladesh is increasingly defined by and through an adaptation regime, which governs the landscape of possible intervention in anticipation of climate change.

Silvia Masiero will present her new book Unfair ID (Sage, Data Justice Series, October 2024). Using a data justice lens to explore narratives of unfairness in, and harm caused through digital ID, she will present some of the stories contained in the book, building on her 14-year research on the use of Aadhaar's biometrics in the Indian Public Distribution System (PDS). Based on this, she will discuss routes to build activist mechanisms to combat unfairness.