The University of British Columbia Interdisciplinary
Histories Research Cluster
With Radha D'Souza
(P
rofessor of Law\, Development and Conflict Studies at the School of Law\, U
niversity of Westminster\, UK)
February 10\, 2021
Location: online via
Zoom
Registration required.
Talk abstract:
Professor Radha D’Souza’s address will focus on state violence against women in India. India is widely perce ived to be the most populous democracy in the world. Its progressive consti tution puts classical liberal rights including equality\, non-discriminatio n\, right to life and access to justice at the heart of the constitution as fundamental rights. At the same time India is also seen as the most danger ous country to be a woman in. Within and outside academia\, the endemic and routinised violence against women is widely attributed to familial and soc ietal causes. If the law fails to bring perpetrators of violence against wo men to justice\, corruption within police and dysfunctional criminal justic e system is seen as the problem. Going beyond these frames of analysis\, Pr ofessor D’Souza will examine statutes like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that exempt army personnel form prosecution in occupied territories\, s tate organised pogroms against religious and caste groups\, and the endemic everyday police violence against poor\, Dalit (marginalised castes) and Ad ivasi (indigenous) women. Her address will call into question the assumptio ns about normative and procedural standards\, including human rights standa rds\, in Legal Studies and the theoretical and methodological strategies in Gender Studies that are typically used to analyse violence against women i n India. State violence against women unravels assumptions about gender-bas ed violence and rights based legal remedies.
About the speake r:
Dr. Radha D’Souza is a professo r of Law\, Development and Conflict Studies at the School of Law\, the Univ ersity of Westminster in the United Kingdom. She is a critical scholar\, so cial justice activist\, barrister\, and writer\, from India. Radha’s resear ch and writing focus on the Global South\, in particular South Asia\, law a nd colonialism and neo-colonialism\, history of imperialism in South Asia\, and comparative theory and philosophy. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who has published in the fields of sociology\, history\, geography\, devel opment studies\, besides legal studies. She has written on activism and the security state\, anti-colonial movements in South Asia\, and on militarisa tion and ethnonational conflicts in South Asia. Her recent book What’s Wron g With Rights? Social Movements\, Law\, and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto\, 2 018) maps the transformations in the regime of international rights to the transformations in post-World War imperialism. Her most recent article ‘Law and Development: From ‘company raj’ to UN System via indirect rule’ (Routl edge\, 2020) examines how legal principles of colonial governance under the British Empire have come to be elevated as international law.
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This event is organized by Dr. Sunera Thobani (UBC Asian Studies) and Int erdisciplinary Histories Research Cluster. It is co-sponsored by the Ce ntre for India and South Asia Research/Institute for Asian Research/School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Department of Asian Studies at UBC.
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