Description:

The Critical Theory Cluster presents a graduate workshop with Shalini Randeria, Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna & Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva

The "Between the Law" of the Cunning State

This workshop on the work of SHALINI RANDERIA will concentrate on two of her claims made in her work on the “cunning state”. In her view, obituaries of the state and of sovereign forms of power are premature. And, in postcolonial contexts, modern biopolitical aims are likely to bear witness to colonial legacies. For example, environmental governance (the creational of environmental sanctuaries, national forests, wildlife protection, biodiversity conservation ) may also bear witness to colonial legacies. Such forms of governance may redeploy sovereign legal principles such as eminent domain, renew colonialist lineages including population control and surveillance, forcibly displace, erode the traditional rights of local communities, or disregard local knowledge in the promotion of the universal rationalities of scientific knowledge (2007a, 13). The workshop will focus on a working lexicon of the postcolonial biopolitics of Randeria’s “cunning states”: reregulation, recolonization, internal colonialism, normative heterogeneity, overlapping sovereignties, the epistemology of the periphery — and a revised understanding of bare life appropriate to these phenomena.

Required Reading:

Randeria, Shalini. “Global Designs and Local Lifeworlds: Colonial Legacies of Conservation, Disenfranchisement and Environmental Governance in Postcolonial India.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 1 (2007): 12-30.

Optional Readings:
Hussain, Nasser. “Beyond Norm and Exception: Guantánamo.” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 734-753.

Randeria, Shalini. “The State of Globalization: Legal Plurality, Overlapping Sovereignties and Ambiguous Alliances between Civil Society and the Cunning State in India.” Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 1 (2007): 1-33.

Randeria, Shalini, and Ciara Grunder. “The (Un)Making of Policy in the Shadow of the World Bank: Infrastructure Development, Urban resettlement and the Cunning State in India.” In Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright, and Davide Però, 187-204. New York: Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford, 2011.

SHALINI RANDERIA is Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute, a position she has held since autumn 2012. She was Research Director of the Graduate Institute (Jan. 2015- Dec. 2016) and is also Rector of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, since January 2015. She is Visiting Professor at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB). She was Chair of the SH-2 Panel of the ERC grants; a Member of the Senate of the German Research Council (DFG), President of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin. She was Max Weber Professor for Sociology at the University of Munich, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Central European University Budapest.