The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) has the pleasure of inviting you to a seminar with John Harriss on:
Empowerment and the Governmentality of the Post-Liberalization State in India: Civil Society, Politics and Urban Governance
Wednesday, 5 December 2007, 14.00-16.00
Danish Institute for International Studies
Main Auditorium
Strandgade 71, ground floor, 1401 Copenhagen K
Background
The neo-liberal governance agenda now influential in India involves a package including decentralisation, community involvement and participation, which are supposed to ‘empower’ especially poorer people. There is held to be a ‘new politics’ built up around voluntary associations in civil society that is more genuinely participatory and responsive to people’s needs than representative democracy. This seminar subjects these ideas to ethnographic scrutiny, from a study of associational activity in Chennai. There is ‘new politics’, but it is a sphere of middle-class activism and largely exclusive in relation to working poor people, failing to address their linked interests in women’s rights, rights to housing and to means of livelihood. Increasing opportunities for participation actually increase political inequality. Hence ‘New politics’, as the mode of governmentality of the post-liberalization state, does not incorporate the urban poor, nor articulate political practice and civil society. This is why there is so often resort to coercive action by the state in India’s metropolitan cities, contradicting the blandishments of ‘empowerment’.
John Harriss is Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, and has been Director of the School for International Studies from September 2006. A social anthropologist by training and vocation, he has long standing interests in the political economy of development, and in politics and society in South Asia. Recently, he has engaged in debates on the concept of social capital and about civil society and politics, and popular representation, especially with regard to India [see Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Polity Press, 2000, co-written with Stuart Corbridge), Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital (LeftWord/Anthem Press, 2002) and Politicising Democracy: The New Local Politics of Democratisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, edited with Kristian Stokke and Olle Tørnquist)].
Harriss taught and was Dean of the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, before moving to the London School of Economics where he established and directed the Development Studies Institute. In 1994-96, he served as the Head of the Regional Office for South and Central Asia of the Save the Children Fund (UK). Before coming to Simon Fraser University, he was directing the Research Programme Consortium on Institutions and Pro-Poor Growth, funded by the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom government.
Programme
14.00-14.10 Welcome
Neil Webster, Senior Researcher, DIIS
14.10-15.10 Empowerment and the Governmentality of the Post-
Liberalization State in India: Civil Society, Politics and Urban
Governance
John Harriss, Professor, Simon Fraser University
15.10-15.30 Coffee Break
15.30-16.00 General Discussion
Chair: Neil Webster, Senior Researcher, DIIS
Practical Information
The seminar will be held in English.
Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. Please use the registration form below no later than Tuesday, 4 December 2007 at 12.00 noon.
Please await confirmation by e-mail from DIIS for participation.
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