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The current crises in Hong Kong and Jammu and Kashmir, though distinct in their historical and political contours, arose when central governments sought to increase sovereign power against the aspirations of many local residents for unrealized autonomy. Public authorities have laid claim to constitutional-legal provisions to support their stances, and have simultaneously resorted to coercion against local opposition. Such actions have prompted widespread international and some domestic condemnation. At the same time, large sections of mainstream media and publics in China and India have offered competing narratives that are generally supportive of the authorities. Please join us for this panel on the two crises and how they juxtapose the challenges of nationalism and liberal democratic norms. Panelists will explore the roots of the conflicts, constitutional questions, the strategies of state authorities and local resistance, the range of domestic and global responses, and prospects for the future.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. & Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the award-winning book The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World and Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty, both published by Columbia University Press. His articles have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Development and Change, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His analyses of the Chinese and global political economy and Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, among other publications.

Zha Jianying is a writer, journalist, and cultural commentator in both English and Chinese. She is the author of two books in English, Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China (named “One of the best books of 2011” by The Economist), and China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, and five books of non-fiction and fiction in Chinese. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Dushu, and Wanxiang. Tide Players was selected by The Economist as “One of the Best Books of 2011.” A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she also has been a regular commentator on current events on Chinese television, and works as the China Representative of the India China Institute at The New School in New York.

Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. She is a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and conflict, militarization and impunity, popular protest, and law and memory in Kashmir. Her research has appeared in journals such as Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today, Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly.  Her current book project is a legal ethnography of how cases relating to securitization and militarization have been contested and adjudicated in the courts of Kashmir. At Ohio University, Professor Duschinski teaches anthropology courses on violence, peace, human rights, and law.

Sandipto Dasgupta is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research. His research is in the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonization, and postcolonial presents. His book manuscript, Legalizing the Revolution (under contract with Cambridge University Press), reconstructs the institutionalization of nascent postcolonial futures through a historical study of the Indian constitution making experience. He received his PhD in political theory from Columbia University. Before arriving at the New School this fall, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and the British Academy, and taught at Ashoka and Columbia University.