2012-13 Events Schedule

Even as empires have been ushered out the door by democratic revolutions, declarations of universal rights of self-determination, and announcements about the end of history, they keep creeping back onto the global political stage.  It's not surprising that they continue to be the subject of scholarly scrutiny. Whether the focus is land empires, overseas colonial empires, informal empires, or hegemonic interstate relations, scholars from a variety of disciplines have probed common underlying themes: motives of expansionists; mechanisms of rulership, including collaboration among core and peripheral elites; resistance to empire builders that leads to repression, accommodation, and modification of ruling strategies; and the costs and benefits of empires, at both the core and at the periphery. 

The research community on Empires: Domination, Collaboration and Resistance, first funded by PIIRS in spring 2012,  will frame its interdisciplinary probing of the dynamics of empires on the interrelated themes of domination, collaboration, and resistance.

• Domination and "Repertoires of Power." Empires at their simplest involve rule of one polity over another polity or people.  As such, creating empires has always led to domination by some over others.  How this domination is structured, however, has varied enormously, anywhere from tight and rigid hierarchies to loosely organized pluralistic structures. A scholarly examination of the repertoires of power – not only coercive, but also economic, ideological, and literary -- used to build and sustain empires is bound to prove deeply revealing of the nature of any given empire: motives, hopes, and ambitions of the rulers; mechanisms of rule; resistance to or acceptance of imperial rule; and the impact of imperial rule on the ruled.
• Collaboration as a Mechanism for Sustaining Empires. While domination is a core aspect of empires, over time most empire builders settle down to rule by establishing collaborative links with peripheral elites.  These collaborative links may be more or less reciprocal.  Students of direct versus indirect forms of colonial empires have long understood these variations.  The process of collaboration as a mechanism of sustaining empires is nevertheless understudied, especially in the case of informal empires; comprador elites are neither heroic figures from the standpoint of metropolitan scholarship on empires, nor are they much loved by a variety of nationalists.  As a research community we hope to investigate further the process of collaboration that sustains empires.  
• Resistance as Constitutive of Empire. The research community is also interested in exploring processes of resistance to empires -- the flip side of their domination.  The study of resistance within empires tends to focus either on the early phases of  conquest, when resistance is often suppressed by superior force, or on the tail-end of the imperial experience, when, for instance, nationalists topple a wobbly system and help give rise to a new nation-state.  According to this conventional plotline, resistance is often expressed in the language of nationalism, sovereignty, and the rights of self-determination.  This conventional focus is clearly important.  What distinguishes the focus of this group, however, is its concern with resistance throughout the imperial experience, as constitutive of it – not something that comes with the initial or final chapters of imperial formations.   

Jeremy Adelman is Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture, professor of history, director of the Council for International Teaching and Research, and chair of the Fund for Canadian Studies. He is interested in the history of Latin America in comparative and world contexts with a focuse on economic, legal, and political transformations. Adelman’s books include as coauthor, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart  (2011), a history of the world from the beginning of humankind; and as author, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006); Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the New World (1999);  and Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada (1994).  His newest book, The Worldly Philosopher: Albert O. Hirschman. An Intellectual Journey through the Twentieth Century, is forthcoming in 2013. Adelman's current  book projects are "Latin America: A Global History" and a study of Latin American social scientists from the Great Depression to the present. Ph.D. Oxford University.

G. John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs and codirector of both the Center for International Security Studies and the Princeton Project on National Security, a collaborative multiyear project examining the changing character of America’s international security environment. His research focuses on international relations and US foreign policy. A prolific author and editor, Ikenberry’s most recent book, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, was published in 2011 and the award-winning After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, was published in 2001.Among many activities, Ikenberry has served on an advisory group at the State Department and on the Council of Foreign Relations’ Henry Kissinger-Lawrence Summers Commission on the Future of Transatlantic Relations. He is on the editorial board of World Politics and is coeditor of International Relations of the Asia Pacific, a Japanese journal of international relations. Ph.D. University of Chicago.

Atul Kohli is David K. E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs, a professor of politics and international affairs, chair of the World Politics editorial board, and codirector of the Project on Democracy and Development. His principal research interests are in the area of comparative political economy with a focus on the developing countries.  A prolific author and editor, Kohli’s books include Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (2012); Democracy and Development in India: From Socialism to Pro-Business (2010); and State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (2004). Among his many activities, Kohli has served as cochair and vice chair of the American Political Science Association. His current research investigates imperialism and the developing world. Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley.

Amaney Jamal is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University, and director of both the Workshop on Arab Political Development and the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and  Justice. Jamal's current research focuses on democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Arab World. She extends her research to the study of Muslim and Arab Americans, examining the pathways that structure their patterns of civic engagement in the US. Jamal has written or edited four books: Of Empires and Citizens: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All? (2012); Barriers to Democracy, winner of the Best Book Award in Comparative Democratization at the American Political Science Association (2008); Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9-11 (2009), as coauthor; and Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11 (2008), coedited with Nadine Naber. She is a principal investigator of the "Arab Barometer Project," winner of the Best Dataset in the field of Comparative Politics: Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award (2010); co-PI of the "Detroit Arab American Study," a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study; and senior advisor on Pew Research Center projects focusing on Islam in America (2006) and Global Islam, (2010). In 2005, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar. Ph.D. University of Michigan.

Nick Nesbitt is a professor and chair of the Department of French and Italian. His teaching and research interests include Haitian, French-Caribbean, and African studies; postcolonial and critical theory; political philosophy; and African diasporic music and cinema. His work in francophone studies focuses on the intellectual history of the black Atlantic world.  Nesbitt’s books include, as author, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008) and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (2003), and, as editor or coeditor, Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution (2008) and Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music (2010). His most recent book, forthcoming from University of Liverpool Press, is entitled Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant.  Ph.D. Harvard University.

Rachel Price is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures. Her research focuses on Latin American, circum-Atlantic, and Cuban literature and culture; media and literature; and comparative imperial histories. Her book manuscript, The Object of the Atlantic: Concretude 1868–1968, about the emergence of a postromantic aesthetics of concretude in Brazil, Cuba, and Spain in the wake of changes in empire and capitalism in the 1890s, is under review.  Ph.D. Duke University.

Michael A. Reynolds is an  associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, where he teaches courses on the Middle East and Eurasia, comparative history, war and politics, secularism, and the Caucasus. He is the author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (2011), cowinner of the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for international history. He is currently at work on a book on the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the first republic in the Muslim world, and its origins in the intellectual, cultural, social, and geopolitical interstices of empire. Ph.D. Princeton University.

Bradley Simpson is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. His interests include 20^th-century US foreign relations and international history, with a focus on US-southeast Asian relations, political economy, human rights, and development. His first book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968, was published in 2008. He is currently researching the global history of self-determination, exploring its political, cultural, and legal descent through post-1945 US foreign relations and international politics. Simpson is founder and director of a project at the nonprofit National Security Archive to declassify US government documents concerning Indonesia and East Timor during the reign of General Suharto (1966–98). This project will serve as the basis for a study of U.S.-Indonesian international relations from 1965 to 1999 that explores how the international community's embrace of an authoritarian regime in Indonesia shaped development, civil-military relations, human rights, and Islamic politics in the region. Ph.D. Northwestern University.

Patricia Kim is a graduate student in the Department of Politics. Her research interests include the ideological and material aspects of great power relationships with secondary states. She is interested in contemporary asymmetric relationships, such as the US-ROK alliance, as well as earlier systems, such as the Chinese imperial system and colonial Japan's East Asia co-prosperity sphere. Before beginning her studies at Princeton, Patricia worked as a research intern at the Congressional Executive Commission on China and the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Workshop
Friday, March 1, 2013
Violence and Empire: An Interdisciplinary Workshop
Organizer: Nick Nesbitt

Speakers:
Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Tulane University, "Empire and the Post-Cold War Atmosphere: 'New Clothes' of Violence in Africa"
Alberto Moreiras, Texas A&M University, "Indigeneity and the Question of Cosmopoliical Philosophy"
Gary Wilder, City University of New York, "Rethinking Violence as Political Metric"

1:30-4:30 p.m.
216 Aaron Burr Hall
Open to the public
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Workshop
Friday, April 19, 2013
Does the US Run an Informal Empire?
Moderator: Atul Kohli

Commentators:
G. John Ikenberry, Princeton University
Bradley Simpson, Princeton University

Panelists:
Julian Go, Boston University
Greg Grandin, New York University
Melani McAlister, George Washington University

1:30-4:30 p.m.
216 Aaron Burr Hall
Open to the public
 

Graduate Student Workshop Series
Colonialism and Imperialism

February 21, 2013
Mutiny’s Bounty: Anthropology, Pitcairn Islanders, and the Making of a Natural Laboratory on the Edge of Britain’s South Seas Empire
Adrian Young, History of Science
Commentator: Christina Welsch, History
Noon
216 Aaron Burr Hall

March 14, 2013
Modernization Theory, Islam, and a Hermeneutic for Development
Megan Brankley, History
Commentator: Faez Syed, Religion
Noon
216 Aaron Burr Hall

April 4, 2013
Algerian Medical Auxiliaries at War
Hannah-Louise Clark, History of Science
Commentator: James Casey, History
Noon
216 Burr Hall

April 18, 2013
“Possessing” the City’s History: Private Property, Urban Renewal, and Assembling Public Memory in Istanbul and Cairo
Sarah El-Kazaz, Politics
Commentator: Edna Bonhomme, History of Science
Noon
216 Aaron Burr Hall
Paper

Throughout  AY 2012 - 13, on Wednesdays, the research community on Empires will host a series of public lectures with visiting scholars. These  4:30 lectures are as follows: 

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The application period has ended.

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Read the feature article on the Empires research community