Political Economy of Contemporary South Asia

Find the Agenda/ conference schedule here

South Asia’s shift from empire to nation-states have trodden a path that does not replicate the capitalist-democratic trajectories of the west. South Asian scholarship has had intense debates with scholars, politicians, and activists innovating with new concepts, vocabularies, and methods to make sense of postcolonial South Asian. In India, for instance, debates such as the modes of production and Subaltern Studies, as well as political movements and parties inspired by Lohiaite socialism, opened up new ways of theorizing popular agency, caste-class struggle, and postcolonial politics. Economic liberalization from the 1980s onwards has fundamentally restructured both relations between international agencies and nation-states, and relations between state and society. In the wake of severe crises — ranging from the corporatized legal changes to Indian agriculture and the swift and protracted agrarian / farmers protests against it, to Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt crisis and the debilitating shortages in essential services such as food and an overall explosion of inequalities — we are keen on inaugurating a series of annual conferences in North America on the future of South Asian political economy. Our rationale for locating these conferences in North American universities is because we are keen on a global framing for them: financial and democratic crises, ethnonationalism, joblessness, inequalities, and the new forms of populism, are not themes that are unique to South Asia, and we want to bring South Asia in conversation with other regions and structure dialogues in comparative political economy.

For the inaugural INET South Asia YSI conference in the U.S, our key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the rise of informal economies, industrial clusters, in-between agrarian-urban and peri-urban spaces force us to rethink familiar transition narratives and to eschew them in favor of more grounded theories. These are processes that are enabled in various complex ways by populist politics, both progressive and conservative. We propose the following themes for our 2-day conference:

● Dialectics of Globalism and Nationalism
● Inequality and Populism
● Agrarian and Urban Crises
● Data and Social Justice

Find the Agenda/ conference schedule here

Instructions for abstract submission

Submit an abstract within 500 words. The abstract should ideally fall under one of the themes. We will look for theoretical considerations/ assumptions, research questions, methodology, and findings when reviewing the abstracts.

We encourage PhD scholars in their advanced stage dissertation writing stage, post-docs, and early career Assistant Professors to submit their abstracts for consideration.

Important dates

The last date for abstract submission is 30th June, 2023
Notification for selected abstract: 15th July, 2023
The last date for submission of the full paper is the 15th August, 2023
Notification for selected full papers/ paper presenters 1st September, 2023

For any further information, please contact of us;
southasia@youngscholarsinitiative.org

Organizing team

Sai Balakrishnan (University of California, Berkeley)
Vamsi Vakulabharanam (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Arun Balachandran (University of Maryland Maryland/Columbia University)
Sattwick Dey Biswas (Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, India)
Sunanda Nair-Bidkar (Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York)
Jay Poklington (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)
Heske van Doornen (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)

Organizations

Department of City and Regional Planning (UC Berkeley), Institute for South Asia Studies (UC Berkeley), The Center on Contemporary India (UC Berkeley), Global Metropolitan Studies (UC Berkeley), Asian Political Economy Program (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), INET's Young Scholars Initiative