The Department of International Relations invites you to its event of the Monsoon Seminar Series 2019 on 14th November 2019. Prof Amit Gupta is delivering a guest session on "The Globalization of Sports and the Rise of Non-Western Nations". Abstract: International sports and their institutions were dominated by the western nations who set the rules and agendas of these games.  Over the last two decades, however, we are starting to see a shift in the economic and decision-making power in international…

The Department of International Relations invites you to its twelfth event of the Monsoon Seminar Series 2019 on 19th November 2019. Prof P R Kumaraswamy is delivering a guest session on "Is it Jerusalem or Jerusalems? : The Centrality of the Arab-Israeli Conflict". Abstract: The city of Jerusalem is holy and sacrosanct to the Abrahamic faiths, namely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Some of the critical events in these monotheist religions are associated with the city. Over the centuries, the political…

The Department of International Relations invites you to its event of the Monsoon Seminar Series 2019 on 20th November 2019. Ambassador Rakesh Sood is delivering a guest session on "Is Nuclear Arms Control Dead?". Abstract: The nuclear age dawned in 1945 and almost simultaneously began efforts at nuclear arms control. Gradually, it took shape in the form of multilateral treaties like the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and a series of bilateral agreements between the US and the USSR and later Russia.…

Title: Dictatorship and the Provision of Public Goods Speaker: Shabana Mitra, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Management- Bangalore Abstract: This paper examines the nature and scope of public policy in non-democracies. We use the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 to examine how similar ethnic groups living in similar agro-climatic conditions - when exposed to different governance regimes - obtain substantially different configurations of public goods. Our methodology draws upon the shifts in the central regime in Pakistan, between popularly elected governments…

The Department of International Relations invites you to its fourteenth event of the Monsoon Seminar Series 2019 on 26th November 2019. Prof Soumita Basu is delivering a guest session on "A Feminist Reading of Diplomatic Practices at the UN". Abstract: The United Nations was established in 1945, as famously proclaimed, ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’. It has aimed to do so in various capacities, including as a forum for multilateral diplomacy. With factors such as the…

Title: The Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Forbearance Speaker: Nirupama Kulkarni, Research Director, CAFRAL Abstract: The Reserve Bank of India enacted a series of ‘asset-quality’ forbearance measures during the global financial crisis. Using a bank-firm matched dataset, we find that there is a strong positive correlation between bank- and firm-distress measures and evidence suggests that the forbearance measures encouraged stressed banks to channel credit to low-liquidity and low-solvency firms. Lending to zombie-firms increases and to healthy firms falls significantly for industries and banks with higher…

    The neurobiology of aesthetic experiences and the significance of beauty Semir Zeki University College London Abstract The experience of beauty, whether derived from sensory sources such as visual art or music, or from highly cognitive ones such as mathematics, correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain, field A1 of medial orbito-frontal cortex (mOFC). This raises important questions about the role and uses of beauty not only in our daily experience but also in our efforts to understand…

Abstract: Our current picture of the organization of the visual brain, with the primary visual cortex (area V1) providing all the feed-forward input to the other visual areas lying outside it, needs to be modified. Recent, and older, studies show that there are at least three parallel feed-forward pathways that reach the visual areas of the brain outside area V1; one is the classical pathway reaching them through area V1 while the other two by-pass V1 to reach them directly.…