Event From Date
Event End Date
Event Title
CSSS organises a talk by Prof. Irfan Ahmad
Event Details
Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Irfan Ahmad
(Senior Fellow, Max Planck Institute, Germany)
Will be presenting a paper on
Indian Democracy and the Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: An Anthropological Outline
Date & Time:
March 28, 2019 (Thursday), 11 AM
Venue:
CSSS Committee Room (Room No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract:Electoral democracy is often viewed as politics of welfare. That warfare is also constitutive of democracy remains hushed. In this talk, I discuss how the mechanisms of warfare-welfare works in democracies in general. I elucidate this thesis by engaging with analyses of the 2014 Parliamentary elections over longue durée. Deploying an interdisciplinary – at times in-disciplinary too – approach, it aims to throw a pebble into the consensually calm and muddy water of democracy to craft an alternative and democratic idea of democracy. An intellectual inquiry such as this entails arriving at the truth and the true rather than describing mere reality
Bio:Irfan Ahmad is Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. He has authored two monographs and co-edited two volumes, The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare: A Long View of India’s 2014 Election (Oxford University Press; with Pralay Kanungo) being the most recent. A political anthropologist, he has taught at universities in Australia and the Netherlands. He is on the editorial committees of journals such as Public Anthropologist. He was the founding co-editor of Journal of Religious and Political Practice.