EDGS 2021-22 Speaker Series: Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS)

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EDGS 2021-22 Speaker Series

EDGS 2021-22 Speaker Series

Throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, the series will explore three main topics: 1) Political Islam, 2) Colonialism and Imperialism, and 3) Remaking Modernity in Southeast Asia. In each lecture, the speaker will discuss their recently published book. Students will have the chance to engage with the author after each lecture.

Rudolf Mrázek

Professor Emeritus of History, University of Michigan

May 4, 2022

The Complete Lives of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity

Watch Dr. Mrázek 's talk

In The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrázek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi “ghetto” for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch “isolation camp” Boven Digoel—which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrázek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks—buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports—continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way, Mrázek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.

Gustav Papanek

Professor Emeritus of Economics, Boston University

April 25, 2022

Indonesia's Narrowing Paths to Prosperity: Deep Reforms to Eliminate Poverty and Achieve High Income Status by 2045

Watch Dr. Papanek's talk

Dr. Gustav F. Papanek is President of the Boston Institute for Developing Economies (BIDE) and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Boston University. In seven decades of work on the economies of development, he has directed 15 major policy advisory and research teams, most focusing on aspects of development strategy. He has written or edited nine books, 50-plus articles, and 52 other publications.

For the last five decades, he has been considered one of the outstanding development economists, as exemplified by his leadership of the Harvard University Development Advisory Service (then the HIID); BIDE; and several AID, World Bank, ADB and Harvard University advisory and research teams. He has provided economic advice to prime ministers, presidents, ministers, central bank governors and senior officials in: Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Micronesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Korea, Nepal, Iran, Ghana, Greece, Colombia, Liberia, Guinea, Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Argentina.

Tania Li and Pujo Semedi

Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto and Professor, Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gajah Mada

April 12, 2022

Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone

Watch Dr. Li and Dr. Semedi's talk

In Plantation Life Dr. Tania Murray Li and Dr. Pujo Semedi examine the structure and governance of Indonesia'scontemporary oil palm plantations in Indonesia, which supply 50 percent of the world's palm oil. They attend to the exploitative nature of plantation life, wherein villagers' well-being is sacrificed in the name of economic development. While plantations are often plagued by ruined ecologies, injury among workers, and a devastating loss of livelihoods for former landholders, small-scale independent farmers produce palm oil more efficiently and with far less damage to life and land. Li and Semedi theorize “corporate occupation” to underscore how massive forms of capitalist production and control over the palm oil industry replicate colonial-style relations that undermine citizenship. In so doing, they question the assumption that corporations are necessary for rural development, contending that the dominance of plantations stems from a political system that privileges corporations.

John T. Sidel

Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science

March 2, 2022

Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia

Watch Dr. Sidel's talk

In Republicanism, Communism, Islam, Dr. John T. Sidel provides an alternate vantage point for understanding the variegated forms and trajectories of revolution across the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, a perspective that is de-nationalized, internationalized, and transnationalized. Sidel positions this new vantage point against the conventional framing of revolutions in modern Southeast Asian history in terms of a nationalist template, on the one hand, and distinctive local cultures and forms of consciousness, on the other. Sidel's comparative analysis showshow—in very different, decisive, and often surprising ways—the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions were informed, enabled, and impelled by diverse cosmopolitan connections and international conjunctures. Sidel addresses the role of Freemasonry in the making of the Philippine revolution, the importance of Communism and Islam in Indonesia's Revolusi, and the influence that shifting political currents in China and anticolonial movements in Africa had on Vietnamese revolutionaries. Through this assessment, Republicanism, Communism, and Islam tracks how these forces, rather than nationalism per se, shaped the forms of these revolutions, the ways in which they unfolded, and the legacies which they left in their wakes.

Sylvia Tidey

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia

February 11, 2002

Ethics or the Right Thing? Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance

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Dr. Tidey presents a sympathetic examination of the failure of anti-corruption efforts in contemporary Indonesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Importing critical insights from the anthropology of ethics to the burgeoning anthropology of corruption, Tidey exposes enduring developmentalist fallacies that treat corruption as endemic to non-Western subjects. In practice, it is often indistinguishable from the ethics of care and exchange, as Indonesian civil servants make worthwhile lives for themselves and their families. This book will be a vital text for anthropologists and other social scientists, particularly scholars of global studies, development studies, and Southeast Asia.

Risa J. Toha

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale-NUS College, Singapore

January 18, 2022

Rioting for Representation: Local Ethnic Mobilization in Democratizing Countries

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Ethnic riots are a costly and all too common occurrence during political transitions in multi-ethnic settings. Why do ethnic riots occur in certain parts of a country and not others? How does violence eventually decline? Drawing on rich case studies and quantitative evidence from Indonesia between 1990 and 2012, this book argues that patterns of ethnic rioting are not inevitably driven by inter-group animosity, weakness of state capacity, or local demographic composition. Rather, local ethnic elites strategically use violence to leverage their demands for political inclusion during political transition and that violence eventually declines as these demands are accommodated. Toha breaks new ground in showing that particular political reforms—increased political competition, direct local elections, and local administrative units partitioning—in ethnically diverse contexts can ameliorate political exclusion and reduce overall levels of violence between groups.

Intan Suwandi

Assistant Professor of Sociology, Illinois State University

November 12, 2021

Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism

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Winner of the 2018 Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Dr. Suwandi's Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains-vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals-Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx's own theory of exploitation.

Arnout van der Meer

Associate Professor of History, Colby College

October 15, 2021

Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

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Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized, maintained, negotiated, and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized. Dr. van der Meer explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national, racial, social, religious, and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia