Sort

By publication date

By relevance

• 31 jan 2019

  01 fév 2019

  Zurich

  Conference, symposium - Political studies

  The Pillars of Rule

  The Writ of Dynasties and Nation-States in the Middle East and South Asia

  Max Weber famously argued that states lay claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over certain circumscribed territories. However, historical and anthropological research has challenged his ideal-typical vision by showing how the idea of the unitary state is a fiction that can only be produced through the action of interrelated but partly autonomous agents. States, and the various institutions that constitute them, face the strategic task of identifying and domesticating the social networks that are necessary for them to secure control over particular territories and their populations. Local strongmen and notables can in turn use their own local influence in order to gain recognition from higher-level, more powerful, state institutions. In this international conference, scholars from a variety of disciplines will explore the ways in which dynastic power and/or the rule of the state is asserted, negotiated and contested across both the Middle East and South Asia.

  Read announcement

• 06 jui 2014

  Paris

  Conference, symposium - Asia

  Islam and Regional Cultures in Pakistan

  CEIAS conference

  With the hope of throwing new light on the transformations of Pakistani society, this one-day conference intends to move the focus away from two dominant discourses on Pakistan : that is, on the one hand, the security discourse of political and media circles that reduces Pakistan to a state on the fringe of failure, trying to cope with radical Islam and terrorism; and, on the other hand, Pakistan’s official nationalism, which rests on a unitary conception of the nation that disregards the cultural and religious diversity of the country, stressing instead Islam and Urdu as national unifiers while relegating regional cultures to folklore. This conference hopes to partly fill this gap by inviting participants to illustrate the complex, lived experience of Islam in Pakistan, the identity component of religious practices that do not fit in the dominant norm, and their inscription in local political and ethnic relations. Papers would ideally use first-hand observation and/or analyses of cultural productions to examine circumscribed case studies.

  Read announcement