Development and Conflict in South Asia Seminar Series

The Law, Development and Conflict Research Group at Westminster Law School and the SOAS South Asia Institute are pleased to invite you to a series of six lectures co-hosted by them on the theme of ‘Development & Conflict in South Asia’ from October 2019 to March 2020.  Seminars will be followed by a small reception event.

Professor Felix Padel: "Conflicts over land and resources in India's tribal areas: dams, mines, factories and sanctuaries."

Nicholas Hildyard: Extreme Infrastructure: Infrastructure corridors, Just-in-time delivery and the assault on Labour

Professor Felix Padel is a renowned anthropologist specialising on development conflicts among India’s indigenous peoples, the Adivasis. Professor Padel studied classics at Oxford University before switching to anthropology. He has studied and worked with pioneers in Indian sociology like JPS Uberoi, Veena Das and André Beteille. He was professor of Rural Studies in IIHMR, Jaipur, visiting faculty in JNU and continues to be affiliated to Oxford University and Centre for World Environment History in the University of Sussex. His books “Sacrificing people: invasions of a tribal landscape” (1995/2010); 'Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel' (2010 with Samarendra Das), and 'Ecology, Economy: quest for a Socially Informed Connection' (2013 with Ajay Dandekar and Jeemol Unni) remain seminal texts on contemporary development conflicts and indigenous peoples in India.

Nicholas Hildyard works with Corner House, a solidarity and mutual learning group. The Corner House has brought leading public interest cases before UK courts including a successful a judicial review in 2008 of the decision by the UK Serious Fraud Office Director to stop its investigation into alleged bribery and false accounting by BAE in relation to its Saudi Arabian deals and a complaint against British Petroleum led consortium in 2011 for breaching OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises in its operations on its 1,760 kilometre-long Caspian Sea oil pipeline. Hildyard is the author of Licensed Larceny: Infrastructure, Financial Extraction and the Global South (Manchester Univeristy Press 2016).

For more details on the seminar series and the speakers please visit Law, Development & Conflict website at  lawdevelopmentconflict.com or email [email protected]