24/04/2025 - Complex Indebtedness: Power and Hierarchies in International Order

WHEN: 24 April 2025, 13:30–15:00

WHERE: MUP Prague-Strašnice building, Dubečská 10, Room 305

Registration:
MUP academic staff - not required
MUP students and scholars outside MUP – please register via email: ales.karmazin@mup.cz

SPEAKER: Dr Meera Sabaratnam (University of Oxford)

Abstract:
In this talk, I set out an analytic description of international order that I call ‘Complex Indebtedness’. Inspired by postcolonial and materialist approaches to the development of the state and international hierarchies, I argue that sovereign states, empires and the global political economy can be understood as interlocking and nested regimes of indebtedness, which are simultaneously moral and material in character. By drawing attention to the terms on which debts are asymmetrically and sometimes violently generated, accounted for, recognised and enforced, we are able to appreciate the workings of power more acutely, and to make sense of movements for justice that are based on reparative propositions.