At CASA, in collaboration with the Innovation Foundation for Democracy and its director, Prof Achille Mbembe, we are hosting the symposium Mapping Democratic Decline, Imagining Democratic Futures: Transregional Dialogues Across Asia and Africa from 14 to 16 February 2024 at the University of Pretoria.

The symposium is geared towards fostering critical and comparative dialogues about the forces fuelling processes of autocratization across Asia and Africa, and conversely, the prospects for imagining and building democratic futures in and across the two continents. 

The symposium will open with a keynote lecture by Prof Adam Hanieh from the University of Exeter in the UK, who will reflect on what democratic futures might look like in the MENA region some ten years after the Arab uprising and in the context of the ongoing carnage in Gaza. We will also be joined by Prof Nivedita Menon from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, who will discuss her forthcoming book Secularism as Misdirection (Duke University Press) and we will be screening the documentary film #GoHomeGota about the Sri Lankan uprising of 2022. The filmmaker, Sulochana Peiris, will join us to discuss the film and the significance of the process that it portrays.

See full programme here.

RSVP here.

For updates see CASA website and @CAsianSAfricaUP.