Friday, September 12, 2014
2:00pm – 4:00pm
MIT, Center for International Studies
Lucian Pye Conference Room, E40-496
1 Amherst St.
Cambridge, MA 02142
Free admission
Friday, September 12 at 2:00 p.m. — Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics @ MIT
Shivaji Mukherjee, University of Toronto — Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India: Historical Legacies of British Indirect Rule
Shivaji Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Toronto University. Shivaji's research interests lie at the intersection of state formation, civil conflict, and political economy of development. He worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, and then did an MA in Political Science at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD in political science at Yale University.
His dissertation is on the Maoist insurgency in India, and uses data gathered during field work, archival data and quantitative analysis of sub national datasets to demonstrate that colonial institutions of indirect rule selected by the British set up the structural conditions for post colonial insurgency through path dependent mechanisms. Shivaji hopes to work in the future on state formation, the use of different kinds of counter insurgency strategy by the Indian state, and also various aspects of the Maoist insurgency, and other ethnic insurgencies in India.