The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Begins	7 Apr 2008 - 4:00pm
Ends	7 Apr 2008 - 6:00pm
Location	Wolff Conference Room, Mezzanine Level, 65 5th Ave.

Barnett Rubin is Director of Studies, Senior Fellow, and Project Coordinator of the Afghanistan Reconstruction Project at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.  He is widely recognized as a leading world authority on Afghanistan and expert on questions of conflict prevention, state formation and human rights.

In November-December 2001, Dr. Rubin served as special advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement.  He thereafter advised the United Nations on the drafting of the constitution of Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Compact, and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy, and continues to engage in current high-level debates in Afghanistan today.  He is currently chair of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council, and a member of the Executive Board of Human Rights Watch/Asia, and the Board of the Open Society Institute's Central Eurasia Project.

Dr. Rubin is the author or editor of eight books.  His major publications include Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002); The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System (2002; first edition 1995); and The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (1995).  In addition, he has written numerous articles and book reviews, which have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Orbis, Survival, International Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books.

Sanjay Ruparelia is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at The New School for Social Research.   His areas of teaching and research encompass comparative politics, political economy of development and modern South Asia.  His main research project addresses several issues in modern Indian democracy: economic liberalization, militant Hindu nationalism and the rise of lower-caste, communist and regional parties.  Dr. Ruparelia is writing a book regarding these themes, provisionally entitled "Divided We Govern: federal coalition politics in India", and co-editing a volume of essays, "A Great Transformation? Understanding India's New Political Economy".  He conducted preliminary research in 2006 on the politics of statebuilding in Afghanistan.

http://www.newschool.edu/gf/centers/southasia/index.htm