Continuing our seminar series in conjunction with the Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies, we are thrilled to have a paper from Adil Hasan Khan on traditions of civility in the South Asian context, particularly thinking about the Citizenship protests of 2020. You can subscribe to our seminar series here on youtube.

Abstract: ‘This talk provides a genealogy of the concepts of the secular, religion and politics in early modern and colonial South Asia in order to make intelligible a tradition of civility, one that rivals the project of colonial modernity and cultivates the conditions of co-habitation of different denominations in South Asia. It was prepared in the wake of the then ongoing protests against the adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in India, widely perceived to threaten civic co-habitation. The talk also reflects upon how being attentive to a tradition of civility demands a different account of the relations between international law, religion and politics than has been provided by critical international lawyers.’

Dr Adil Hasan Khan is currently a McKenzie Fellow at the Melbourne Law School with a research focus on the intersections between international law and disasters, particularly in South Asia.