In a society that experiences secessionist conflict, many things are not what they seem. The book presented in this talk (which is available open access via the CUP website) adopts a performative perspective to understand the peculiar institutional landscape the ensued around the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, both during and after the civil war. It draws on two decades of fieldwork across towns and villages in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, ethnography within Sri Lanka’s civil service, and privileged access to Norwegian-facilitated peace process.

Networked Bollywood provides interdisciplinary analysis of the role of the stars in the transformation of Hindi cinema into a global entertainment industry. The first Indian film was made in 1913. However, filmmaking was recognized as an industry almost a hundred years later. Yet, Indian films have been circulating globally since their inception. This book unearths this oft-elided history of Bollywood's globalization through multilingual, transnational research and discursive cultural analysis.

The two-day conference launches an interdisciplinary network ‘Rethinking Europe’s East-West Divide’ which was awarded UACES funding. The network aims to overcome disciplinary siloes and to fully integrate the study of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) into mainstream European Politics and European Union Studies. The network advances a novel research agenda for studying political processes in CEE and Western Europe together.