The speakers will focus on how rightwing populist narratives of nativism, religion, tradition, and gender have affected and influenced discriminatory policies and politics in the name of Hindu nationalist ideologies, or Hindutva. Of particular importance is how the politicization of religion and nationhood, has become instruments for engaging both local and global populations into an imaginary Hindu supremacist ideology. Here, the latest advances in Indian economic- and foreign policy doctrines, especially the Modi doctrine, are discussed in terms of how these have expanded Hindu economic and foreign policy discourse into one that privileges populist narratives of neocolonial majoritarian practices in relation to minorities and underprivileged communities.
Professor Dibyesh Anand is the Head of the School of Social Sciences at in London. He is the author of monographs "Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination” and “Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear” and has spoken about and published on varied topics including Tibet, China-India border dispute, Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia in India. He is an avid Facebooker and available at www.facebook.com/dibyesh.
Catarina Kinnvall is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. She is also the former Vice-President of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Psychology. Her research interests involve political psychology, migration and multiculturalism, globalization and security, religion and nationalism, with a particular focus on South Asia and Europe. She is the author of a number of books and articles. Some of her publications include: Bordering Securities: The Politics of Connectivity and Dispersion (co-ed, Routledge 2014); ‘Borders, Security, and (Global) Governance’, (2013, special issue ed.) Global Society, 27(3); The Political Psychology of Globalization: Muslims in the West (co-author, Oxford University Press 2011); Globalization and Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological Security (Routledge 2006).
Dr. Nitasha Kaul is a Kashmiri novelist, academic, economist and poet. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London. She has previously been a tenured academic in Economics at the Bristol Business School and in Creative Writing at Royal Thimphu College in Bhutan. Her research and writing over the last decade and a half has been on identity, political economy, democracy, feminist and postcolonial theory, Kashmir and Bhutan. In her recent work, she has addressed issues of nationalism and neoliberalism in contemporary India and the question of nation-states and refugees in Europe. She has authored books including the scholarly monograph ‘Imagining Economics Otherwise’ (Routledge, 2007/2008) and a Man Asian Literary Prize shortlisted novel ‘Residue’ (Rainlight, 2014). More at www.nitashakaul.com
Spyros Sofos is the CMES Research Coordinator, liaising with the University’s Research Service, providing support to researchers at CMES, identifying funding opportunities and working on the development of university, national and international collaboration in research and research-related activities. His research interests include the study of social identities, collective action, conflict and conflict transformation, insecurity and populism - his current work focuses on Muslim communities in Europe, a comparison of contentious politics in Europe and the Middle East, the mediation of Jihad, the ‘social construction’ of the Islamic State (IS) and the lived experience of politics in Turkey.