APSA South Asia Preconference, 2025
This event is supported by 大象传媒's David Lam Centre.
The APSA South Asia Pre-Conference, 2025, brings together papers by scholars working on different aspects of democracy, elections and conflict/ security in South Asia and is timely given the democratic backsliding in different countries in South Asia, as well as the recent tensions and conflict between India and Pakistan. In the first panel, Aseema Sinha (Claremont McKenna College) describes the mechanisms of Majoritarian nationalism, corporate power, and state power underpinned by new developmentalism, and their effects on quality of Indian democracy. Feyaad Allie (Harvard) & Pratik Mahajan (Yale) analyze how democratic backsliding weakens both civil society organizations (CSOs) and opposition parties in India, and Madhavi Devasher (Univ. of New Hampshire) analyzes political appeals to Muslims in the 2024 National Elections in India.
In the second panel, Erum Haider (Wooster) studies the privatization of electricity provision in Pakistan, and Tanushree Goyal (Princeton) uses an experiment to study the symbolic effect of gender quotas, while Thibaud Marcesse (Boston College) analyzes descriptive representation quotas in Panchayati Raj elections in India.
In the final panel on security, Emily Russell (Stanford) studies rural policing in tea plantations in Assam, Dipin Kaur (Ashoka) analyzes the role of co-ethnicity in counter insurgency in Punjab, and Clary, Gulzar and Siddiqui (SUNY, Notre Dame) use surveys to evaluate the effects of the recent nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan on regime stability.