Faculty Research Forum: Precarious Sovereignty with Dipali Mukhopadhyay

Professor Dipali Mukhopadhyay discusses recent research in this new talk, "The Politics of Precarious Sovereignty and the War on Terror," with introductory remarks by Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs Peter M. Lewis.

Despite a scholarly tendency to compare the wars of the 21st century to those of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, the “age of terror” was novel on account of the motivating threat. Beyond the intervener and the indigenous, a third actor – “the terrorist” – served as the distinct and defining actor on the scene. At least ostensibly, the United States and the regimes it would support, starting in Afghanistan, were embarking on a partnership, a joint effort to vanquish this extremist, if elusive, apparition. The intervening outsiders articulated the initial parameters of war-making and state-making, but the ultimate responsibility to manage the threat was thrust upon the indigenous insiders. And that responsibility necessitated indigenous sovereignty. In a new book project, Mukhopadhyay explores the paradox at the heart of state-building as an instrument of counterterrorism - regimes born of this war would exist in the service of a mission that, at once, necessitated and constricted their sovereignty. In her talk, she will consider this precarious brand of sovereignty as part of a longer lineage of imperial intervention and explore its implications for contemporary international relations.

Dipali Mukhopadhyay is an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Mukhopadhyay is the author of Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and, with Kimberly Howe, of Good Rebel Governance: Revolutionary Politics and Western Intervention in Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She currently serves as Senior Expert on Afghanistan with the U.S. Institute of Peace and as Vice President for the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. She previously held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and Columbia University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. She earned her doctorate at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and her B.A. in political science at Yale University.

Event details:

• Mon, Mar 24, 12:30–2 PM
• Hopkins Bloomberg Center #258
• Light lunch provided

Host or Publisher Office of Faculty Affairs