To many across the world, the resurgence of nationalism in contemporary politics signals a welcome recognition of the realities of international power, and of the primary purpose of the state - to pursue its own self-interest, where that is defined as contiguous with the interests of its members. 

Yet nationalism’s resurgence, within both authoritarian and democratic states, poses practical, ethical and existential problems. Practical, in that government policies motivated by nationalism disrupt global economic interdependencies which have proved effective in raising growth; ethical, in that nationalism rejects the universalist ambitions of liberalism, with its respect for the individual and their rights, and instead gives priority to the cultural self-regard of a particular collective - thereby diminishing the worth placed on other, different forms of life. And existential, in that the central challenge facing human species survival - the challenge of dealing with the effects of human choices and activities upon the earth’s environment - have little likelihood of being solved through the frame of nationalism. 

In this lecture, Sunil Khilnani will provide an introduction to the history and broad interpretations of nationalism, will consider the insights as well as the limits of academic understanding of nationalism, and will ask what forms or definitions of nationalism might be justifiable under present conditions. 

Sunil Khilnani is Professor of Politics and History, and Dean, AshokaX, at Ashoka University. Prior to that, Khilnani was Avantha Professor and founding Director of the India Institute, King’s College London; from 2002 to 2011, he was the Starr Foundation Professor and founding Director of South Asia Studies at the John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C..

He has been a Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Seikei University, Tokyo. He was elected a Research Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, has held a Leverhulme Fellowship, and has been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. In 2020, he was a Presidential Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. 

His publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (1993); The Idea of India (20th-anniversary edition published in 2017); with Sudipta Kaviraj, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (2000); a collaborative volume (with Pratap B. Mehta, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan et al), NonAlignment 2.0: a Foreign Policy for India in the 21st Century (2013); with Arun Thiruvengadam and Vikram Raghavan, Comparative Constitutionalism in South Asia (2013). His most recent book is Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives (2016), which accompanies his 50-part BBC podcast and radio series.

Prerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University. She holds appointments across Political Science and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and is also affiliated with the Departments of Sociology and the Center for Contemporary South Asia. Singh is a fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (CIFAR) and co-convenor of the Brown-Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar in South Asian Politics. Singh completed her PhD and MA from the Department of Politics at Princeton University, the tripos in Social and Political Studies from Cambridge University, UK, and a BA (Honors) in Economics from St Stephen’s College at Delhi University.