Seminars will be held in person at 4pm on the following Tuesdays at the Rothermere American Institute, except where noted.

Listen to a panel of experts discuss the outcomes of the 2026 American midterm elections. This event is in partnership with the Reuters Institute and the Rothermere American Institute.

Seminars will be held in person at 4pm on the following Tuesdays at the Rothermere American Institute, except where noted.

Abstract: Fazlur Rahman (1919 – 1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important scholars of Islam. After completing his doctorate at Oxford, he became an advisor to Ayub Khan’s military regime in Pakistan before being driven out in 1968 following a series of “controversies” and the unceremonious reception of his book, Islam (1966). This paper attempts to reconstruct one aspect of Rahman's political philosophy by exploring his ambiguous relationship with Muslim modernism as well as the character of his final decade in Pakistan.

Abstract In this paper, I explore how colonial-era censorship laws continue to shape the national identity and cultural production of Pakistan. Drawing on legal history, literary analysis, and decolonial theory, I examine how laws governing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition – originally codified in the Indian Penal Code under British rule – have been selectively adapted by the Pakistani state to police cultural and religious expression.

Indian environmentalism has been richly told as a story of forests, rivers and grassroots movements confronting the developmental state. This talk turns to other important trends that have emerged over the past two decades, as caste, religion and nationalism have moved to the centre of Indian political and social life and, with them, of its environmental politics. It traces four threads. The first is Hindu nationalism, from the RSS to the Modi government, which has drawn sacred rivers, cows and “Vedic” ecology into cultural and political mobilisation.

This roundtable brings two recent works into conversation about the long history of law, the meaning and function of legal order, the history of empire, and international order. Fernanda Pirie’s The Rule of Laws traces four thousand years of the world’s legal traditions, challenging the assumption that European law was ever the natural or inevitable global standard. The Cambridge History of International Law: Asia, edited by Maria Adele Carrai and Surabhi Ranganathan, examines the histories of international law in Asia—the contested languages of sovereignty, the legacies of empire, and Asia’