On the subject of
citizenship
ABDELWAHAB EL-AFFENDI is Professor of Politics and Head of the Politics and IR Program at the
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. From 1998, he was Coordinator of the
Democracy and Islam Program at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University
of Westminster. He also worked as a pilot (1976-1980), editor of Arabia magazine
London (1982-1990) and diplomat (1990-1994). He was ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the
RCUK Global Uncertainties Programme (2009-2012), and is member of the ESRC’s
Peer Review College. His most recent books include: Genocidal Nightmares:
Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (2015), Darfur: A Decade in
Crisis (in Arabic, 2013). He is also co-author of the Arab Human Development Report
(2004), and the two reports: Contextualizing Islam in Britain (2009, 2012).
ARI SITAS joined UCT as a professor in May 2009 after 26 years at the University of Natal and
later the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He was a senior fellow and research associate
in a number of institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, Ruskin College
and Oxford University. He was a president of the South African Sociological
Association, a Vice-President of the International Sociological Association and an
Executive member of the African Sociological Association as well. He was also a Fellow
at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and, a
Guest Professor at the Albert-Ludvigs University of Freiburg. Ari chairs the Board of the National Institute for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and directs the South African BRICS Think Tank which serves on the BRICS Think Tanks Council. He has been appointed on the board of the National
Research Foundation. He completed his PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand
on the emergence of trade unions and social movements among black urban and
migrant workers (1960s-1980s) under the supervision of Eddie and the late David
Webster in 1984. He is also a writer, dramatist and poet and has been an activist in
the Anti-Apartheid movement. Recent Publications (2013) Principal author of
Gauging and Engaging Deviance 1600-2000, Delhi: Tulika Press (2011) Co-author of
the Charter for the Future of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, Pretoria:
Department of Higher Education (2010) The Mandela Decade 1990-2000, Pretoria:
the University of South Africa Press.
BRIAN RAFTOPOULOS is a former Professor of Development Studies at the University of Zimbabwe from 1990-2006, he is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research
at the Centre for Humanities Research, UWC. He has published widely on
Zimbabwean history, labour history, historiography, and politics.
JUAN OBARRIO is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
He holds a PhD from Columbia University. He works in the fields of critical theory
and political anthropology, focusing on issues of state, democracy, law, violence,
and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Mozambique and South Africa.
He has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton),
MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council and the
American Council of Learned Societies. He has been a visiting professor in Paris,
Johannesburg and Buenos Aires. He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws in
Mozambique (2014), Corps Etranger (2014), A Matter of Time: State of Things and
Secrecy in Northern Mozambique (forthcoming) and co-editor of African Futures:
essays on crisis, emergence, possibility (2016)
KARUNA MANTENA is Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of the South
Asia Studies Council at Yale University. She is also co-director of the International
Conference for the Study of Political Thought. Karuna holds a BSc(Econ) in
International Relations from the London School of Economics (1995), an MA in
Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex (1996), and a PhD in
Government from Harvard University (2004). Her research interests include
modern social and political thought, the theory and history of empire, and South
Asian politics and history. Her first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends
of Liberal Imperialism (2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century
British imperial ideology. She is currently working on a book project on M.K. Gandhi
and the politics of nonviolence, tentatively titled Gandhi’s Realism: Means and Ends
in Politics.
KUAN-HSING CHEN is Professor in the Graduate Institute for Social Research and
Cultural Studies, Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, founding Chair of the board of
trustee for the Inter-Asia School (an international NPO), and currently Executive
Director. He taught in Tsing Hua University (1990-2008) and has held visiting
professorships at universities in Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, the U.S. and Hong
Kong. His recent publication Asia as Method—Towards De-imperialization (Duke
University, 2010) has Chinese, Korean and Japanese editions. He has edited volumes
in English, including Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routeldge
1996) and Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Routeldge 1998), Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies Reader (Routeldge 2007), and in Chinese: Cultural Studies in Taiwan
(2000) and The Partha Chatterjee Seminar-- Locating Political Society (2000), Chinese
Revolution Reconsidered: Mizoguchi’s Mode of Thought (2010), Paik Naik-chung:
Division System and National Literature (2010), Chen Yingzhen: Thought and
Literature (2011). Founding chair of Taiwan’s Cultural Studies Association, founding
member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (and its Consortium), and a core
member of the Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, he is a co-editor of the
journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements (2000-) and Renjian Thought Review
(mandarin edition; 2010-). In recent years, he has been involved in the West
Heavens Project and in establishing the Inter-Asia School to launch the Modern
Asian Thought project; with these involvements, he and other members of the Inter-
Asia School have organized “Indian-China Social Thought Forum” (2010), “Asian
Circle of Thought Shanghai Summit” (2012), “Inter-Asia Biennale Forum” (since
2014) and “Bandung/Third World 60 Years Series” (2015). At this moment, he
participates in launching Council for Social Research in Asia, African-Asia- Latin
America Institute in Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art, Another World Center,
Critical Creative Industry (Factory) Lab and Agon Roundtable.
LYN OSSOME is Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research
(MISR) in Kampala, Uganda. She received her PhD in Political Studies from Wits
University and was previously postdoctoral fellow at the Unit for Humanities at
Rhodes University (UHURU). Her research specializations are in feminist political
economy, land and agrarian studies and feminist political theory. She has been a
visiting scholar at the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, and will be Visiting
Teaching Faculty at Yale University this fall.
MBONGSENI BUTHELEZI is Research Manager at the Public Affairs Research Institute in
Johannesburg. He previously held senior researcher positions at the Research
Initiative in Archive and PublicCulture and at the Rural Women's Action Research
Project (now the Land and Accountability Research Centre) at the University of Cape
Town. Mbongiseni writes on rural governance in South Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in
English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
NAMHLA MATSHANDA teaches International Political Dynamics and Comparative Area
Politics in the Political Studies department at UWC. She has a BA Honours degree
from the University of the Western Cape, a Masters degree in International Relations
from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD in African Studies from
Edinburgh University. Her research interests are on post-colonial processes of state
formation in Africa. She is especially interested in examining historically local
conceptions and articulations of statehood in the Horn of Africa. For her doctoral
thesis she conducted extensive field research in Ethiopia where she examined the
historical evolution of statehood in eastern Ethiopia, she did this by looking at the
relationship between state projects of territorialisation and people’s experiences.
NIVEDITA MENON is a Professor at Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, is the author of Seeing like a Feminist (2012).
Apart from research papers in Indian and international journals, her previous books
are Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law (2004); and a book co-
written with Aditya Nigam Power and Contestation: India after 1989 (2007). She also
has two edited volumes Gender and Politics in India (1999) and Sexualities (2007);
and a book co-edited with Aditya Nigam and Sanjay Palshikar Critical Studies in
Politics. Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (2013). She is a regular commentator on contemporary issues on the collective blog kafila.org (of which she is one of the founders), and active in democratic politics in
India. She also has translated fiction and non-fiction from Hindi and Malayalam into
English, and from Malayalam into Hindi, and received the AK Ramanujan Award for
translation instituted by Katha.
PARTHA CHATTERJEE is a political theorist and historian. He studied at Presidency
College in Calcutta, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. He
divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of
more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding
member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian
Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies.
His books include: The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in
Most of the World (2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of
the Kumar of Bhawal (2002); A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (1997);
The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and
Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993). He is
also a poet, playwright, and actor. In the Mira Nair film The Namesake (2007), he
played the role of “A Reformed Hindoo.”
SIBA GROVOGUI is a professor of international relations theory and law in Africana Studies at Cornell University. Grovogui is currently completing a manuscript titled “Otherwise Human: Human and Humanitarian Rights Traditions.” It explores modern idioms and languages that give expression to the ‘human’ as an actualization of moral choices and ethical commitments to other. He has recently completed a ten-year long study of the rule of law in Chad, in the context of the Chad Oil and Pipeline Project, funded partly by the National Science Foundation. The project draws on the concrete context of Chad to make significant observations on neoliberal applications of the rule of law in Africa as well as the place of Africa in the global political economy. Siba is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law, University of Minnesota Press (2009).
STEVEN FRIEDMAN is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. He is a political scientist who has specialized in the study of democracy. He researched and wrote widely on the South African transition to democracy both before and after the elections of 1994 and has, over the past decade, largely written on the relationship between democracy on the one hand, social inequality and economic growth on the other. In particular, he has stressed the role of citizen voice in strengthening democracy and promoting equality. He is the author of Building Tomorrow Today, a study of the South African trade union movement and the implications of its growth for democracy, and the editor of The Long Journey and The Small Miracle (with Doreen Atkinson), which presented the outcome of two research projects on the South African transition. His current work focuses on the theory and practice of democracy and his study of South African radical thought Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid was published in 2015. He writes a weekly column in Business Day on current political and economic developments.
SUREN PILLAY is Associate Professor at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. He currently leads an Andrew W. Mellon funded research project, Migrating Violence, in the NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities at UWC. He has an Mphil, and a Phd in Anthropology from Columbia University. His current research focuses on two areas of interest: citizenship, violence and the politics of difference; and experiments in cultural sovereignty in postcolonial Africa in the sphere of knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences In 2015 Suren was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. He has also been a visiting fellow at Jawarhalal Nehru University, India, the Makerere Institute for Social Research, Uganda, the Center for African Studies, Univ. of Cape Town, and the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University. He is a previous editor of the journal Social Dynamics, blogs for Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), and has published widely in the press.