Spring 2014 | Public lectures and events | Video

War: what is it good for?

Contributor(s): Professor Ian Morris | If you had been born 20,000 years ago, you would have faced a one in ten or even one in five chance of dying violently. But in the century since 1914—despite its two world wars, atomic bombs, and multiple genocides—that risk has fallen to barely one in 100. Why? The answer is uncomfortable: despite all its horrors, over the long run war itself has made the world a safer and richer place, because war alone has proved able to create larger societies that pacify themselves internally. This talk looks at how this paradoxical process has unfolded and what it means for the 21st century. Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of classics and professor of history at Stanford University and a fellow of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He directs Stanford's archaeological excavations at Monte Polizzo, Sicily, and has published ten books including Why the West Rules – For Now and War: What is it good for?. This event marks the publication of his latest book War: What is it good for?: The role of conflict in civilisation, from primates to robots.

LSE Asia Forum 2014 - 19:00 Session

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun, Senator Dato' Sri Abdul Wahid Omar, Professor Arne Westad, Professor Tao Wenzhao, Dr Hassan Wirajuda, Professor Ricky Burdett, Datuk Syed Mohamed Ibrahim, Professor Mike Douglass, Professor Danny Quah, Azman Mokhtar… | The LSE Asia Forum is an important and very public part of the School's strategy to enhance its long standing relationship with the rapidly developing Asian region. LSE has historically attracted many very talented students and staff from all major Asian countries. The School has a large and distinguished group of alumni in the region and has been active in building partnerships with business and governments for many years. The LSE Asia Forum is a unique opportunity to bring together LSE's key partners in the region. The Forum provides an opportunity for analysis of different perspectives on the economic, social, political and cultural contributions Asia is making to global development. The 6th Asia Forum entitled 'Building Asian futures: integration, welfare and growth?' took place on 2-3 April 2014 at the Shangri La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism: some lessons from modern Indian history

Contributor(s): Professor Partha Chatterjee | This lecture deals with four strands of trans-regional political movement in India’s anti-colonial history. The first is that of Islamic jihad which took inspiration from Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi’s campaigns in Sind, Afghanistan and Punjab in the early 19th century, was a submerged current in the 1857 revolt, sought to restore the Ottoman Khilafat after World War I and assumed the somewhat quixotic form of Obaidulla Sindhi’s attempt in the 1920s to mount an anti-British jihad from Kabul, Moscow and Ankara. The second consists of the international connections and alliances of nationalist armed revolutionaries, from the Ghadar party, Britain and US-based organizers such as Hardayal and Savarkar, the connections of the Bengal revolutionaries with Germany, the Irish rebels and anarchist groups in Europe, to the alliance of Subhas Chandra Bose with Germany and Japan during World War II. The third were the strong connections of Indian communists with the international communist movement. Finally, there were important critics such as Tagore who deplored the narrow self-aggrandizement of nationalism and pleaded for an opening to world humanity. All of these strands, with their possibilities and limits, continue to be vibrant today. Professor Chatterjee's lecture will inaugurate the Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity research group convened by Dr Ayça Çubukçu at LSE's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. Partha Chatterjee is a professor of anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies at Columbia University and a Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India. He is a political theorist and historian and divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the director from 1997 to 2007. A major focus of Partha Chatterjee’s work is nationalism, but in order to follow his thoughts on this topic, one must simultaneously think also of colonialism, post-colonialism, modernity, and the idea of the nation-state, and also summon up, simultaneously with that cluster of concepts, a not-nationalist and counter-colonial viewpoint about what these terms actually represent (or could actually represent), with special reference to India. His books include: The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002); A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (1997); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993). He is also a poet, playwright, and actor.

LSE Asia Forum 2014 - 15:40 Session

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun, Senator Dato' Sri Abdul Wahid Omar, Professor Arne Westad, Professor Tao Wenzhao, Dr Hassan Wirajuda, Professor Ricky Burdett, Datuk Syed Mohamed Ibrahim, Professor Mike Douglass, Professor Danny Quah, Azman Mokhtar… | The LSE Asia Forum is an important and very public part of the School's strategy to enhance its long standing relationship with the rapidly developing Asian region. LSE has historically attracted many very talented students and staff from all major Asian countries. The School has a large and distinguished group of alumni in the region and has been active in building partnerships with business and governments for many years. The LSE Asia Forum is a unique opportunity to bring together LSE's key partners in the region. The Forum provides an opportunity for analysis of different perspectives on the economic, social, political and cultural contributions Asia is making to global development. The 6th Asia Forum entitled 'Building Asian futures: integration, welfare and growth?' took place on 2-3 April 2014 at the Shangri La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

LSE Asia Forum 2014 - 15:40 Session

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun, Senator Dato' Sri Abdul Wahid Omar, Professor Arne Westad, Professor Tao Wenzhao, Dr Hassan Wirajuda, Professor Ricky Burdett, Datuk Syed Mohamed Ibrahim, Professor Mike Douglass, Professor Danny Quah, Azman Mokhtar… | The LSE Asia Forum is an important and very public part of the School's strategy to enhance its long standing relationship with the rapidly developing Asian region. LSE has historically attracted many very talented students and staff from all major Asian countries. The School has a large and distinguished group of alumni in the region and has been active in building partnerships with business and governments for many years. The LSE Asia Forum is a unique opportunity to bring together LSE's key partners in the region. The Forum provides an opportunity for analysis of different perspectives on the economic, social, political and cultural contributions Asia is making to global development. The 6th Asia Forum entitled 'Building Asian futures: integration, welfare and growth?' took place on 2-3 April 2014 at the Shangri La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.