“The important thing to bear in mind is that change could happen and happen suddenly. Revolutions in history have always been unexpected events; they have always come as a surprise.”-Radha D’Souza in conversation with Jonas Staal.
Radha D’Souza is a Professor of International Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster, London (UK). She is also a lawyer, activist, writer and researcher. Her research draws on law, history, comparative philosophy, developmental studies, and geography to understand the entanglements of the colonial past and the colonial present, and incorporates perspectives from the global south. As an activist and organiser, she has worked with labour movements and social justice movements which address the impact of international economic policies on developing countries. She has written extensively about anti-colonial movements in South Asia, colonialism and international law. She has authored books, including: What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto, 2018) and Contextualising Interstate Disputes Over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism (Orient Longmans: 2006). Her most recent work with Sunera Thobani; Decolonizing Knowledge Looking Back, Moving Forward, is an intervention into contemporary debates on decolonizing curricula and universities, arguing that these calls need to be firmly engaged in wider social practices for justice. She also founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes(CICC) with Artist Jonas Staal. A recent iteration of CICC put the East India Company on trial in a public court at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Radha brought to our attention that many histories of solidarity across international movements for self-determination have been marginalised. As our first speaker in the colonial history lecture series, she will speak about one such movement: the Ghadar movement. The Ghadar movement is the first truly international movement of colonised people that shook the British Empire, a movement from which there is much to learn for activists and engaged scholars today.
Featured image attribution: Ghadar flag, Rueben lys at English Wikipedia