China Studies Research Centre, La Trobe University
Thursday 9 May 2019 2:30-4:00pm
Room 318, Education 2 (ED2), La Trobe University
This seminar will examine the ways in which precarious geopolitics along India and China’s contested borders are transforming life in the Himalaya. The possibility of violent conflict arising out of China-India-Pakistan tensions, however, is only one of the region’s problems. The Himalaya is home to a mosaic of ethnic groups and threatened languages. Its ice-deposits (the world’s third largest) feed most of Asia’s large rivers. Militarisation and unchecked development threaten vulnerable communities and fragile ecologies. To make matters worse, the Himalaya is experiencing a warming climate at twice global averages, already leading to landslides and flooding. I will argue that this situation requires an urgent rethinking of the region, one that goes well beyond a states-and-security centred approach to international politics.
About the Speaker
Dr Alexander E Davis is a ‘new generation network’ postdoctoral research fellow in the La Trobe University’s Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy and the Australia India Institute. He is the author of India and the Anglosphere: Race, Identity and Hierarchy in International Relations (2018).