Speaker: Professor Benjamin Smith, University of Florida
Chair: Professor John Sidel, Government/International Relations, LSE
Time: 6-7:30pm
Location: 32 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, LG.04
In this lecture, Professor Benjamin Smith of the University of Florida discusses his current book project, which explores the capacity of some ethnic minorities to sustain lengthy challenges to central governments and the incapacity of others to do so. In the lecture, Professor Smith argues that long-term nationalist rebellion depends, first, on early elite mobilization and, second, on social change catalysed by that mobilization. The answer is historical in the sense that those early rebellions create both macro-historical changes and legacies of resistance. First, they catalyse large-scale social change within ethnic minority groups that, paradoxically, leave them decades later much more capable of mobilizing against states that forcibly imposed those changes in the first place, Second, those legacies make future rebellion a part of a minority group’s trajectory into the contemporary era by framing future grievances in terms of past resistance and by providing a kind of credible commitment by separatist movements to protecting the group and its members. In addition to providing the credible commitment of sustained struggle, the legacy provides an historical group-level narrative within which to situate contemporary experiences. The empirical chapters employ a natural experiment of history—the division of greater Kurdistan into parts of 4 states in the interwar years—historical and ethnographic research on and in Aceh, Indonesia, and econometric analysis of data from 574 ethnic groups around the world to explore these hypotheses at multiple levels.
Speaker biography
Professor Benjamin Smith is an Associate Professor of Political Science and University of Florida Research Foundation Professor 2011-2014. He is the author of Hard Times in the Lands of Plenty: Oil Politics in Iran and Indonesia (Cornell University, 2007) and of articles in such distinguished journals as World Politics, World Development, Studies in Comparative International Development, and the American Journal of Political Science.