New Approaches to Understanding Mass Violence and Genocide in East Pakistan (1971) and Indonesia (1965-66)
July 11, 2023 – 206 Ingraham Hall
Access the lecture via Zoom here (Passcode 149491)
The events of mass violence and genocide in 1971 in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and 1965-66 in Indonesia were watershed moments in the histories of South and Southeast Asia respectively. Each set of events precipitated a power transition that had profound and lasting impacts on global, regional, and national politics. While the bulk of the literatures on these two episodes of mass violence and genocide have used the lenses of anthropology, cultural studies, history, political science, or sociology to shed light on them, notably excluded from these literatures are the lenses of demography and geography. The aim of this talk is to use the cases of Bangladesh and Indonesia to provide an overview of how demography, with its emphasis on the composition of populations, and geography, with its emphasis on spatial phenomena, can contribute to our understanding of these horrific events. Using the spatial analysis of census data from the two countries, I demonstrate how demographic and geographic approaches can generate material with which to engage in rich and meaningful conversations with the large earlier literatures from other disciplines, often shedding new light on the events and our understanding of them.
Professor Siddharth Chandra’s research interests include behavior and policy relating to addictive substances, the intersection of economics, health, and history in Asia, and applications of portfolio theory to fields outside finance, for which the theory was originally developed. He has received funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his research, which has appeared or will appear in a variety of journals including Emerging Infectious Diseases, Demography, Population Studies, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Tobacco Control, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, the Journal of Research in Personality, the Journal of Regional Science, Land Economics, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, World Politics, and The British Journal of Political Science . At James Madison College, he teaches a senior seminar titled “Drug policy from Asia to America,” in which students learn about different approaches to drug policy in Asia and the USA. He is also Director of the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University.
Professor Chandra received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, his A.M. (Ph.D. pass) in economics from the University of Chicago, and his B.A. (with honors) in economics from Brandeis University. Prior to joining Michigan State University, he was Director of the Asian Studies Center and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.