Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
The key intellectual fault line driving constitutional theory today is the tension between the limits of constitutionalism and the illimitability of constituent power. My paper situates this debate within Hindu and Muslim political thought in South Asia, recasting it as a clash between the prohibitive authority of law and the acquisitive force of sovereignty. I argue that the ethno-nationalist and socio-religious movements of Hindutva and Islamism have shaped the state in postcolonial India and Pakistan through two radically divergent trajectories: Hindutva reconfigures Hinduism substantially as a religion of sovereignty, while Islamism reinterprets Islam essentially as a religion of law. This marks a striking yet regrettable departure from the anticolonial moment, when modernist renditions of Hinduism and Islam treated the two concepts as inextricably entwined. Drawing upon the political thought of Savarkar, Maududi, Gandhi and Iqbal, and putting them in conversation with Kelsen and Schmitt, I establish that only by reckoning with law and sovereignty together can we sustain the political world as a collective space for a life in common.
