Research in Progress Seminar (RIPS)

When: Thursday, March 5, 2020
Time: 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Where: LRW 5001

The Depart of Political Science presents a panel on recently published books by:

Dr. Inder Marwah - Liberalism, Diversity and Domination: Kant, Mill and the Government of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

This study addresses the complex and often fractious relationship between liberal political theory and difference by examining how distinctive liberalisms respond to human diversity. Drawing on published and unpublished writings, private correspondence and lecture notes, the study offers comprehensive reconstructions of Immanuel Kant's and John Stuart Mill's treatment of racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based difference to understand how two leading figures reacted to pluralism, and what contemporary readers might draw from them. The book mounts a qualified defence of Millian liberalism against Kantianism's predominance in contemporary liberal political philosophy, and resists liberalism's implicit association with imperialist domination by showing different divergent responses to diversity. Here are two distinctive liberal visions of moral and political life.

Inder S. Marwah is Assistant Professor of Political Science at McMaster University.  His research lies in the history of political thought, modern political theory, global intellectual history, postcolonial theory and comparative political thought. He has particular interests in the intersection of race, empire and political theory, and in the conceptual tools framing the relationship of western and non-western worlds.

Peter Nyers - Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation (Routledge, 2019)

While deportation has taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states, there are growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status. Rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – this book looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship.

Peter Nyers is University Scholar and Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. His research focuses on the social movements of non-status refugees and migrants, in particular their campaigns against deportation and detention and for regularization and global mobility rights. He is the author of Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation (Routledge 2019) and Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (Routledge 2006). He is also a Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies.

Robert O’Brien - Labour Internationalism in the Global South: The SIGTUR Initiative (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

This case study of the Southern Initiative Globalization and Trade Union Rights argues that labour internationalism is shaped by the national or global orientation of particular groups in the fields of production, regulation and ideas. It details how leftist unions in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, South Africa, and South Korea have tried to bridge their differences and launch collective actions. Drawing upon twenty years of participant observation, O'Brien reveals a specific Global South approach based upon anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism and empathetic internationalism.

Robert O’Brien is Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of international political economy, global governance, global civil society, and the political economy of climate change.  The sixth edition of his co-authored textbook Global Political Economy: Evolution and Dynamics will be published in the Spring of 2020.