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South Asia’s shift from empire to nation-states have trodden a path that does not replicate the capitalist-democratic trajectories of the west. South Asian scholarship has had intense debates with scholars, politicians, and activists innovating with new concepts, vocabularies, and methods to make sense of postcolonial South Asian. In India, for instance, debates such as the modes of production and Subaltern Studies, as well as political movements and parties inspired by Lohiaite socialism, opened up new ways of theorizing popular agency, caste-class struggle, and postcolonial politics. Economic liberalization from the 1980s onwards has fundamentally restructured both relations between international agencies and nation-states, and relations between state and society. In the wake of severe crises — ranging from the corporatized legal changes to Indian agriculture and the swift and protracted agrarian / farmers protests against it, to Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt crisis and the debilitating shortages in essential services such as food and an overall explosion of inequalities — we are keen on inaugurating a series of annual workshops in North America on the future of South Asian political economy. Our rationale for locating these workshops in North American universities is because we are keen on a global framing for them: financial and democratic crises, ethnonationalism, joblessness, inequalities, and the new forms of populism, are not themes that are unique to South Asia, and we want to bring South Asia in conversation with other regions and structure dialogues in comparative political economy.

For the inaugural INET South Asia YSI conference in the U.S, our key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making the transition from farm to factory, but the rise of informal economies, industrial clusters, in-between agrarian-urban and peri-urban spaces force us to rethink familiar transition narratives and to eschew them in favor of more grounded theories. These are processes that are enabled in various complex ways by populist politics, both progressive and conservative. We propose the following themes for our 2-day workshop:

• Dialectics of Globalism and Nationalism
• Inequality and Populism
• Agrarian and Urban Crises
• Data and Social Justice

• Sai Balakrishnan (University of California, Berkeley)
• Vamsi Vakulabharanam (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
• Arun Balachandran (University of Maryland Maryland/Columbia University)
• Sattwick Dey Biswas (Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, India)
• Sunanda Nair-Bidkar (Institute for New Economic Thinking, New York)
• Jay Pocklington (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)
• Heske van Doornen (Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative, New York)

1. The Institute for South Asia Studies, UC Berkeley
2. The Center on Contemporary India, UC Berkeley
3. City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
4. Global Metropolitan Studies, UC Berkeley
5. University of Massachusetts Amherst (Asian Political Economy Program)
6. Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
7. INET’s Young Scholars Initiative