Many congratulations to Dr. Amna Qayum for her award winning dissertation, The Demographic State: Population, Global Biopolitics, and Decolonization in South Asia, c. 1947-71 (Princeton University, 2021)
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
In 1961 Pakistan became the second country in the world to enact an official fertility control policy. Over the course of the next decade, by transforming a prior urban, clinical focus into an expansive statewide project of population control, Pakistan emerged as an epicenter for international demographic research and practice. In dialogue with a global population establishment, both East and West Pakistani actors debated effective methods for calculating demographic statistics, while crafting strategies for the mass adoption of particular contraceptive technologies and reshaping socio-cultural norms. These transnational projects of population control also stimulated debate over normative state power, political and economic inequities between East and West Pakistan, and Cold War geopolitics - ultimately shaping protests against Ayub Khans authoritarian regime during the late 1960s.
Set within the context of two partitions of British India in 1947 and the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971 The Demographic State makes fresh theoretical interventions by foregrounding reproduction to analyze intersections between postcolonial developmentalism, authoritarian forms of governance, and Cold War geopolitics in Pakistan. Drawing on archival and oral historical materials from a transnational set of social scientists, physicians, womens welfare activists, Islamic modernists, bureaucrats, and everyday citizens this dissertation examines how intersecting local and global currents of population management were crucial in shaping normative understandings of gender, development, and Islamic authority; fashioning new practices and technologies of authoritarian state-making; and instituting racialized regimes of global governance.
However, rather than seeing such emergent forms of global governance as a powerless web transcending national borders, this study offers insights into how postcolonial sovereignty intersected with, and disrupted, global biopolitical projects. It demonstrates that population management was a transnational project grounded not only in racialized Cold War biology and economy, but also in the Islamic modernist, gendered, and normative considerations underpinning practices of authoritarian state-making in Pakistan. Building on histories of decolonization, Cold War science and technology, and Islamic thought this dissertation then analyzes how the encounters between postcolonial sovereignty and global biopolitics unfolded in everyday Pakistan.
SPEAKER BIO
Amna Qayyum is a historian of global development, decolonization, and U.S. foreign relations, with a regional specialization in South Asia. As a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Qayyum leads the Echidna Global Scholars Fellowship and contributes to the Center for Universal Educations research portfolio on gender equality in and through education.
Qayyums current research foregrounds gender in the study of political economy and global governance. Her book manuscript, Authoritarian Body Politics in Muslim South Asia, demonstrates how reproductive health and education programs have crucially shaped gender norms, development politics, and U.S. foreign relations in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Focusing both on policymaking and praxis, it links a diverse set of stakeholders from across the Global South and North and reveals the multi-scalar centrality of reproductive politics to everyday life, governance, and global geopolitics.
Prior to joining Brookings, Qayyum was a Henry A. Kissinger postdoctoral fellow in international security studies at Yale Universitys Jackson School of Global Affairs. For the past decade, she has also worked with a variety of government and educational partners in Pakistan. She has advised the government on COVID-19-related human security, collaborated with the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on a research project focusing on population and governance, and conducted educational advising and outreach for the Fulbright Commission in Islamabad. In Washington, D.C., Qayyum has developed research on gender and nuclear security in South Asia as part of the Nuclear Futures Working Group (NFWG) convened by the New America Foundation. As an educator, she has also worked with university and refugee learners through Princeton Universitys Global History Lab.
Qayyum's scholarship has been awarded the 2021 Pirzada Prize in Pakistan Studies by the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has also been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Foundation, the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Joint Center for Economics and History at Harvard University, among other institutions. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post and her scholarly research is forthcoming in Cold War History.
She holds a doctoral degree from Princeton University.
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This event will be live streamed on the Institute's FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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The Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Endowment on Pakistan, established by Rafat Pirzada and his wife, Amna Jaffer, and named after Rafat Pirzadas father, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, supports i) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Dissertation Prize on Pakistan (an annual dissertation prize for the best work in the humanities, social sciences, law, or public health on Pakistan, the region that is Pakistan, or things to do with Pakistan), and ii) the Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada Lecture on Pakistan (an annual lecture that spotlights the winner of the S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize). Rafat Pirzada is a Silicon Valley based entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
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The event is FREE and OPEN to the public.
