Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as they host Professor Swati Srivastava Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue Univeristy. 

The idea of 'hybrid sovereignty' describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as contractors fighting international wars, corporations regulating global markets, or governments collaborating with nongovernmental entities to influence foreign elections. This study shows that these connections – sometimes hidden and often poorly understood – underpin the global order, in which power flows without regard to public and private boundaries. I clarify the stakes of public/private hybrid relations for sovereign accountability and provide analytically useful ways to differentiate hybrid types by examining the English East India Company, Blackwater, the International Chamber of Commerce, and Amnesty International. These transnational private organizations are typically conceived as eroding state sovereignty, but I mobilize them to detail how public/private hybridity actually enables enactments of sovereign power.

In “How I Wrote [Title Here]” we invite scholars to campus to discuss how they turned a research project into a book. Each session features a writer and their recent book. Some are first-time authors, navigating the process from dissertation to publication. Others are well-established scholars with deep experience and diverse perspectives. We will talk about the choices the authors made in research, presentation, and marketing, and the choices that were made for them by circumstances, publishers, and reviewers. The series aims to share stories about the making of scholarly books.

Prof. Srivastava’s research focuses on International Relations, especially private actors in global governance. She has three ongoing interests. One examines how sovereign power is exercised through nonstate actors such as charter companies, security contractors, business associations, and NGOs. The resulting book, Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics, was published by Cambridge University Press (2022). A second project explores the global politics of Big Tech and the related challenges of algorithmic governance. For this work, Professor Srivastava founded and directs the International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) research lab. Finally, she also theorizes relational approaches like constructivism and new kinds of responsibility.