In his essay in the edited volume ” Knowing – Unknowing. African Studies at the Crossroads”, project PI Elísio Macamo rewrites parts of Kant’s “What is Enlightment?” as a starting point to explore African studies’ contribution to a critical reflection on methodology in the social sciences.
Project member Christine Lutringer‘s recent book chapter explores state-society relations and subnational responses to the COVID-19 crisis in India. By examining the intersection of governance and welfare, Lutringer reveals the shifts and tensions in state-society relations that have been induced by the pandemic. The chapter argues that not only the policy response of the central government in Delhi but also the narratives and discourses of the pandemic intrinsically relate to the ways in which “welfare” has been constructed in India.
“Recasting Welfare Politics in India at the Time of COVID-19” by Christine Lutringer (2023) is published in Milanetti, Giorgio, Miranda, Marina and Morbiducci, Marina (eds.) The COVID-19 Pandemic in Asia and Africa. Societal Implications, Narratives on Media, Political Issues. Volume II – Society and Institutions. The book is published by Sapienza Università Editrice and is available as Open Access.
The Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) awarded RtG project member Deval Desai the Best Paper Prize (runner up) for his paper ‘Theorising the anti-fiscal state: evidence from India’ at their Annual Conference 2023. The SLS is the principal representative body for legal academics in the UK whose aim is the advancement of legal education and scholarship in the UK and Ireland.
Desai’s paper ties in with the project research on government underspending undertaken by his work package.
Read more on the website of the Edinburgh Law School.
Other recent publications by Desai include ‘Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world’, published by Law and Policy and available as Open Access. This article explores the relationship between law and crisis, in particularly the lessons the Global North can learn from experiences in the Global South, where such thinking is framed in terms of ‘development’.
This recent book by project member Deval Desai explores the concept of ‘expert ignorance’, whereby ideas about the ‘rule of law’ remain undefined and are indeed kept underdetermined by structures of expertise. This, in turn, regulates their ability to travel beyond their context, for example, in their application in the Global South. Desai’s interdisciplinary approach spans legal theory, development practice, global economic governance and sociology to demonstrate “the enduring power of proclaiming what one does not know.”
Expert Ignorance is published by Cambridge University Press as part of the Cambridge Studies in Transnational Law series, and is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This special issue edited by our project members Deval Desai, Sruthi Herbert and Christine Lutringer explores a matter of critical policy relevance and political importance: the unuse or underuse of public funds, and more specifically of special purpose social funds. The contributions ask: why are there unspent social purpose funds, what do they tell us about the structures of the administrative state, and what can be done to remedy the situation?
The eight chapters, which include contributions by project members Tanushree Kaushal, Luciano Monti and Anna Rita Ceddia, span across two different contexts : India and Italy. These radically different contexts also present valuable points of comparison. The analyzed funds diverge in terms of their institutional design, type of benefits and eligibility of beneficiaries. At the same time, they sit within decentralized democratic frameworks and fragmented and multilevel governance. Juxtaposing the cases, the papers reveal key processes related to fiscal, administrative and policy practices that cause underspending. The papers provide an innovative vantage point to analyze institutional design and reforms in multilevel governance contexts; administrative and bureaucratic state practices; modalities of state-society engagement; and mechanisms to increase democratic accountability.
Comparative philosophy is lively and the field is diverse and assembles different, sometimes even contradictory views. In his contribution to the edited volume ”Comparative Methods in Law, Humanities and Social Sciences”, Ralph Weber presents these different views and then proceeds to deal with the current conceptualisation of the logic of comparison, with specific attention for diminishing bias and the adequacy of bases of comparison. He helpfully states that one way of investigating the inner dynamics of a given comparison is to ask a set of questions: Who is performing the comparison? What commonality supports the choice of what has to be compared? What is being compared with what? In what respect(s) does the comparer compare that which they compare? What relation results from comparing what the comparer compares in that particular respect? How does the choice of the pre-comparative tertium restrict the realm of possible tertia comparationis? How does a chosen tertium comparationis qualify the comparanda? And what role does the comparanda play in the result of the comparison? Each of these questions reveals an enormous complexity, and the answers may be subject to criticism or require further clarification and substantiation. Moreover, most if not all of these questions are highly relevant for comparative legal research too. Weber also deals with some specific issues, such as generalisation, one-sidedness, and the identification of similarities and differences.
In a recent interview Ralph Weber, Principle Investigator in the Reversing the Gaze project, discussed his vision of a post-comparative philosophy with Nevad Kahteran (University of Sarajevo). The discipline, he says, should allow philosophers to be informed by a global outlook and use a variety of styles and conceptualizations from different traditions.
Weber seeks to address the issues of Eurocentrism and methodological problems in comparative philosophy. His book “Comparative Philosophy without Borders” (co-edited with Arindam Chakrabarti) analyzes previous approaches to comparative philosophy and offers paths towards post-comparative avenues.
In this paper, three of our project team: Shalini Randeria (Fellow), Deval Desai (Principal Investigator) and Christine Lutringer (Researcher) demonstrate a set of unintended political and institutional effects of the emergency mobilisation of unspent social welfare funds under Covid-19.
This article was originally written for Global Challenges:
Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies 