Tuesday, March 8, 2022
4-6 pm EST
Online via Zoom.
Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade will discuss his research on how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade will trace the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending with an examination of the first international law to target global terrorism in the 1930s. He will also discuss how many of the ideas embedded in this colonial legislation have continued to shape postcolonial counter-terrorism strategies well into the twenty-first century.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Joseph McQuade is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada and Associate Editor of the Munk School’s blog, Transformations: Downstream Effects of the BRI. Dr. McQuade is a research affiliate at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, the Queen’s University Global History Initiative, and with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society. He is currently a Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.
Dr. McQuade completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, with a dissertation that examined the origins of terrorism in colonial India from an international perspective. This research forms the basis of his first book, A Genealogy of Terrorism: Colonial Law and the Origins of an Idea, recently published by Cambridge University Press. His current project examines counter-insurgency in pre-colonial and early colonial India and Burma, from the mid-eighteenth century to circa 1900. His broader research and teaching interests include critical genealogies of terrorism and insurgency, colonialism in Asia, and transnational connections in the Indian Ocean world.