ANNOUNCEMENT | December 1, 2024
Center for Race and Gender (CRG) anthropologist and interdisciplinary South Asia scholar Angana P. Chatterji has been awarded a five-year grant of $1,125,000 in recognition and support of her research, scholarship, and public-facing work to uphold social justice.
Chatterji, Founding Chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative at CRG and Research Anthropologist, will commence a formative effort to promote new understandings on the impact of majoritarian rule on people’s rights and justice and accountability in two hotspots in South Asia. The project will collaborate with those who live with and intervene on institutionalized and collective social suffering, racialization, decitizening, subjection, and death-bound conditions, and seek to ameliorate their effects, and uphold the right to heal. Especially, this project will work in allyship with rights defenders across myriad issues and their critical work to safeguard and strengthen people’s rights. Conflict-based and upheaval-ridden political economies witness the dramatic amplification of inequities under neoliberal, majoritarian states. These conditions reinforce and expand on erstwhile colonial modalities. The weaponization of tensions by state and non-state entities escalate violent conflict and cultural upheaval by majority over minority groups. Political violence is used in the minoritization of “Others” by state and deep state institutions, disbursed through extrajudicial means and those authorized by law, society, and politics. The proposed activities seek to expand our understandings of securitization, targeting, impunity, and dispossession that afflict the rights of marginalized and minoritized communities, and rights defenders within. The urgency for this project emerges from the lack of national and international guidelines and mechanisms to effectively address the proliferation of political and foundational violence, targeting of rights defenders, and dissolution of basic to non-derogable rights.
"Congratulations, Angana Chatterji, on this exciting award! Chatterji's project addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time. It calls attention to the dangers of majoritarian rule and the need for accountability. By elevating the experiences of minoritized and marginalized communities in South Asia, her project will make visible not just the precarious conditions in which they live and how the conditions are produced, but also the strength and resilience of rights defenders who intervene and safeguard people's rights. This is a bold and daring project with many lessons to impart!" said UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, Lok Siu
"I am thrilled that Angana Chatterji has been awarded this prestigious grant to strengthen people's rights under conditions of majoritarian rule and political violence in South Asia. Chatterji's research will help us better understand an urgent question, which is how best to safeguard rights and rights defenders in conditions of extreme violence and conflict," said Center for Race and Gender Director, Leti Volpp