GLOBAL JUSTICE SEMINARS
The Vedanta Global Justice Seminars reflect The Democracy Institute’s commitment to engaging questions of our political and moral future with specific focus on two of the most urgent planetary issues facing humanity: climate and technology. We believe that no transition to a more just future is possible unless we prepare the next generation of student-scholars to confront and navigate these two vectors of the human condition in a unitary frame. The Vedanta Global Seminars reflect Vedanta’s and The Democracy Institute’s deep investment in preparing future leaders in the fields of political ecology, political economy and democratic government.
The World Bank anticipates the number of people migrating on account of climate catastrophes to touch 140 million by 2050. That is the entire population of California forced to migrate elsewhere almost four times over. Or every last person in the state of Maharashtra forced to flee their home for a more forgiving horizon. The very nature of human mobility—and arguments about the right to move—are unthinkable without understanding the relationship between politics and the planet, between borders and heat. Whether it is overcrowding in the megacities of the developing world, or the endemic violence associated with racially segregated housing in the developed North, nothing aggravates the partitions of our globe more glaringly than the disparity human beings are confronted by when they face increasingly unbearable heat. Every inequality is today magnified under the stress of a warming planet. Every escape route a migrant takes as she becomes a refugee flows directly from the suffering unleashed by the changing oceanic currents and willfully cruel legislation passed by nationalist governments. Grasping the logic of human migration demands that we grapple with movement as not simply a political and legal question—that is, as a function of national sovereignty, citizenship, and borders—but as a planetary one that fundamentally transforms those classical questions. At the intersection of the political and the planetary appears the need for a new thinking about borders (and war) itself. What borders feel like, what borders do to human life, and what they must be changed into are no longer settled questions. We must ask these questions again, in a new language for global politics attuned to planetary peril. The Vedanta Global Justice Seminars tackle these questions of the future along the twin vectors of climate and techno-politics. The core component of the seminars are Vedanta Winter Dialogues, to be held annually in India, on Vedanta's home ground—alternating between the states of Rajasthan, Goa, or Orissa. The Dialogues will supplement our Vedanta Summer Seminars in the UK and Europe, led by a global group of faculty acclaimed for their interdisciplinary work. The Vedanta-Democracy Institute collaboration will bring to the Global South leading public thinkers of the contemporary world who will speak about the moral and epistemic commitment we now need to respond to our Climate Crossroads.
TECHNOLOGY
Liberal democracy has made our personhood and identity—the very structure of private life—the direct business of government. Few human innovations have enabled liberalism to transform our conceptions and mobilizations of identity for political purposes more formidably than the technological advancements of the last half century. For the first time since the Second World War, the fundamental role of technology has pivoted, sometimes in positive response and sometimes in perverse reaction to our democratic hopes and instabilities. Where science was supposed to taper off disparities of race, caste, and wealth in the world’s most populous and precarious democracies, it has instead reinforced those very differences and logics of segregation between communities, castes, and classes. Yet, it is not only STEM (or Higher Ed at large) that bears the mark of our contemporary regressions. The primary role of technology in liberal democracies itself has moved. Technology is now seen neither as an instrument to destroy life nor to prolong it—let alone save it—but as an instrument to morph, mobilize, and deploy the facts of human identity and faces of otherness as political weapons. It is not on factual news but on weaponized data that democracies today live, hanging by an increasingly perilous thread of trust between citizens. We believe that no investigation of our neodemocratic condition can afford to take lightly such a pivotal moment in the history of technological change. Our concern is with the infiltration of technological means into the politics of wealth, racial, and structural inequality: inequalities that are today aggravated by space flights of the ultra-rich and drone warfare of the ultra-powerful in the remotest corners of the planet and beyond. Our concern is with stories of visceral reactions against vaccines, minimum wage, and universal healthcare among those very populations that might benefit most from them, for each such reaction is multiplied today by apparatuses of mass disinformation in a manner not seen in human history. Our concern, from our location in Silicon Valley and universities across the country where culture wars around books and affirmative action play out, above all, is with unpacking the role Big Tech plays in both bridging our existential conflicts and in aggravating our social antagonisms into civil wars.
CLIMATE
Natural disasters are not new to the planet. But disaster capitalism—an empire of profits built out of duress and calamity—is. Proclamations about the end of earth are not unprecedented. But the slow-moving cascade of civic conflict and refugee crises that they are now indissociable from, is. Shortages of food and manufactured famines are not new to many parts of the world either, especially those parts of the Global South that were subject to the rapacious plunders and drills of modern European empires. But the unbearable heating of the planet, which compounds global hunger and disparity, is. Which is why the content and form of coming struggles for social and political justice might in the end be decided by the shape that international institutions and national governments will give to arguments about climate justice. At The Democracy Institute, we believe that a regeneration of notions of social justice and human freedom requires rethinking the redistributive model of wealth and goods upon which modern liberalism has historically functioned, especially as we hurtle towards a world in which those resources that once seemed infinite and inexhaustible become increasingly scarce. How must citizenship and politics adapt to a world that has transformed fundamentally—in many ways, beyond recognition—from what it was when international laws for energy use or commerce in grain were first conceived and agreed upon? And what role might fear—the fear of a world without coal or oil, stoked by the very corporations that profit from their relentless mining—play in the coming battles for equality? What would democracy—and perhaps even more perilously, anti-democracy, not to mention, tyranny—look like on a planet of scarcity and fear? To think of politics within the framework of climate—and conversely, to think of climate as a question of social survival and justice— is a humanist imperative. The harm caused by international inability and unwillingness to do so has already become obvious. But the effects of continued governmental negligence might, within a generation, become inexcusable. We must begin to think of a form of self-government in which climate policy is not a footnote but an opening gambit. For nothing that has ever been the business of modern government—security, peace, and rights—might be left untouched by the unprecedented convergence between planetary peril and political hope of millions in the global North and South.
COMING SOON
Global Justice Seminars
Carbon & Democracy
History and Future of a Political Fuel
The Faces of Injustice
Capstone Seminar in Global Justice
VEDANTA
CLIMATE CROSSROADS PROJECT
Reinscribing the human at the heart of the climate story
The Problem
We are at a singular moment in the history of our planet and its peoples. Global warming is at the point of no return, the 1.5°C target of the Paris accord already breached for the first time in 2024. Heatwaves, flash floods, wildfires, snowstorms, droughts, hurricanes play out in town after town, country after country, on loop. Water scarcity threatens the most catastrophic displacements in history: up to 700 million people by 2030. Technology is now arguably the most powerful tool of segregation and disparity: instrument of misinformation, disinformation and manipulation, on the one hand; the creator of a new global underclass — and overlords — on the other. In both scenarios, it at once dehumanises — personhood compressed as the commodity that is data — and feeds antagonisms over identity and the very questions of personhood it trades on. Technology is also crucial to this moment in other ways as Big Tech becomes our public square and seeks, increasingly, to depoliticise questions of equality and justice; rhetorics of technocratic policy standing in for the human and political arc of social change. Over half of the world’s burgeoning mass of humanity now lives in the Global South, remaking the world in radical, if often opaque ways. In India, now the world’s most populous nation, a lethal cocktail of communal divides, re-entrenched caste divisions, bubbling majoritarian resentments, brutal economic disparity and extreme susceptibility to climate events create the conditions for a seismic shift much beyond its borders, rewriting Asia’s political landscape and the future of democracy itself. Civic hostilities have returned in a violent and visible upsurge to the world’s democracies, where mere rumour and speculation now result in actual deaths; where the very notion of truth has been rendered meaningless through the invention of phrases like “alternate facts”; and where archaic spectacles like lynchings have returned, with an almost visceral exultation, to the public sphere. The first global pandemic of our lifetime has killed over 7 million people and infected 700 million (and counting); its fallout not new solidarities but closed-off borders, profound hostility over public safety measures, and a violent pushback against science itself.
The Question
Across the world, the first and most visceral brunt of the climate crisis will be borne by lower-income, vulnerable populations. The Global South, which models show will be among the severest affected by the climate crisis, is home to cripplingly high numbers of the world's vulnerable. No truthful reckoning with the climate question and no moral vision of a just planetary future is possible, it is today clear, without locating the Global South at its moral and intellectual heart. What does justice look like on a planet fundamentally remade by unbearable heat? How do we begin to transition to a future that does not replicate the barbaric neglect and brutal inequalities of our present? How do we seed, in this perilous moment, a radical—and just—reimagination of our civic and political structures?
This is the ground on which the
Vedanta Climate Crossroads Project is conceived.
Climate change rewrites every dimension of the social contract: every social and economic question today, it is clear, is a climate question. VCCP will undertake rigorous examination of how every dimension, from food to gender justice, culture to jobs, domestic violence to suicide rates, is being brutally reordered by our planetary precarity. VCCP's core mandate is to foreground the human and species effects of climate change, illuminating those often-obscured dimensions in which climate unequally remakes our futures.
Through original scholarship, interviews, essays, podcasts, explainers, videos; deploying great narrative, dialogue and research, VCCP tells the global climate story with the human at its heart. From its vantage point in the Global South, VCCP will engage outstanding thinkers, scholars and experts across disciplines who study these questions and intersections—architects and scientists, lawyers and historians, philosophers and biologists, data analysts and linguists, political theorists and sociologists, conflict-resolution experts and gender scholars, conservationists and feminists, anthropologists and doctors—as they investigate the questions we need to ask if we are to build the equitable, just futures of our democratic promise.