CERI

This event of 16/12/2025 is organised as part of the Nuclear Knowledges Seminar and will be held in a hybrid format.

President Harry Truman was perhaps the most influential American president with regards to the path of global nuclear history. Over the course of his presidential term (1945-1953), he oversaw the first (and so far only) use of the atomic bombs in war, the creation of the system of unilateral nuclear use authority, the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal. But this new book argues that nearly every aspect of the current understanding of these events, and his broader nuclear legacy, has been dramatically misunderstood by both the general public as well as other scholars. Truman was, rather, perhaps the most anti-nuclear president of the 20th century, and did more to push and reinforce the idea that nuclear weapons could never be used again than perhaps any leader since, and during a key period in which it was by no means an obvious conclusion. Using new historical and archival research, this book attempts to make the case for this argument while resolving the apparent and obvious paradoxes that it presents, offering up a new understanding of how we ought to understand Truman's nuclear legacy, especially in our current geopolitical moment.

Speaker: Alex Wellerstein (CERI - Sciences Po and Stevens Institute of Technology)
Chair: Benoît Pelopidas (CERI - Sciences Po)
Discussants: Manuel Dorion-Soulié (École Polytechnique) and Lori Maguire (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardennes)
Scientific coordinator: Benoît Pelopidas (CERI - Sciences Po / CNRS)

Annual Conference of the Sciences Po South Asia Program
December 15 and 16, 2025

December 16
Caste
Chair: Aminah Mohammad-Arif, CESAH-EHESS/CNRS
Jusmeet S. Sihra, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
Old Problem in a New Place: Redlining of Ex-Untouchable Ghettos
Julien Levesque, GSRL-CNRS
Caste, religion, and official categorization in Pakistan: a review of recent scholarship

Religion
Chair: Lola Guyot, DEVSOC, Paris 1/Panthéon-Sorbonne
Gilles Verniers, CERI-SciencesPo
The institutional exclusion of Muslims in India
Charza Shahabuddin, CERI-SciencesPo
Violence and invisibilisation against ethnic and religious minorities in Bangladesh

Policies
Chair: Manisha Anantharaman, CSO-SciencesPo
Nadeera Rajapakse,
Reducing Inequalities for Sustainable, Equitable Human Development in Sri Lanka
Stéphanie Tawa Lama (CESAH-EHESS/CNRS)
Local elections and the deinstitutionalisation of political equality in India

Meeting the Sciences Po South Asian alumni and students’ association
Chairs: Léa Abrieux and Alexandre Mariani (DAI-SciencesPo)
A panel discussion with office-bearers of the Indo-French Circle:
Vithursan Wigneswaran, President
Hanna Elizabeth John, Vice-President
Saee Vaidya, Head of student events and communication
Manucheher Shafee, UN Social Protection Specialist at the World Food Programme
(crédits : CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 World Bank Photo Collection)

Annual Conference of the Sciences Po South Asia Program
December 15 and 16, 2025

15 December

Protest and conflicts
Chair: Christophe Jaffrelot (CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS)
Mirza M. Hassan, BRAC University
The July Popular Upsurge in Bangladesh: The Class and Political Inequalities at Work?
Gameela Samarasinghe, Colombo University
Inequality, Injustice, and Power Imbalances as Root Causes of Suffering in Sri Lanka - Exploring Psychosocial Responses to Crises.

Gender
Chair: Laurent Gayer (CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS)
Farah Said, Lahore University of Management Studies
Gender Norms and the Dynamics of Agency and Power within Households in Pakistan
Kamala Marius, Université Bordeaux Montaigne and SciencesPo Bordeaux
Rethinking Women’s Work and Gender Inequalities in Globalized India

Regions
Chair: Loraine Kennedy (CESAH-EHESS/CNRS)
Mahendran Thiruvarangan, Jaffna University
Ethnically Unequal: The Northern Muslims of Sri Lanka during the Post-war Years
Kalaiyarasan A., Madras Institute of Development Studies
The Political Economy of Regional Inequality and Fiscal Transfer in India

Class
Sonalde Desai, University of Maryland and NCAER
Class of Mind? Subjective and Objective Dimensions of the Middle-Class Status in Modern India
Shandana Mohmand, IDS, Sussex University
The Political Economy of Progressive Tax Reform: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan

This webinar of 10/12/2025 is co-organized with German Institute for Global and Area Studies within the framework of the Franco-German Observatory of the Indo-Pacific.

Speaker:

Plamen Tonchev has been the Head of the Asia Unit at the Athens-based Institute of International Economic Relations (IIER) since 1998. He is a founding member of the European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC) and a contributor to its annual reports. His latest (co-authored) publication, released in August 2025 by the IIER, is entitled China in the Security Conundrum of Europe’s Southeastern Periphery. Mr Tonchev is currently being hosted by the Institute of National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) in Taipei.
Moderators:

Dr Jérôme Doyon, Assistant Professor (CERI, Sciences Po)
Ms Mahima Duggal, GIGA Researcher and former Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the CERI.

Scientific coordinators : Christophe Jaffrelot, Sciences Po-CERI / CNRS, David Camroux, Sciences Po - CERI, Jérôme Doyon, Sciences Po-CERI, Patrick Köllner, GIGA and Johannes Plagemann, GIGA.

Les entretiens de l'Observatoire. Entretien autour de l’ouvrage "Atrocity Crimes, Children and International Criminal Courts : Killing Childhood”, de Cécile Aptel

Cécile Aptel est professeure associée à Tufts University et à Harvard, ainsi que directrice adjointe du Bureau mondial de la recherche et de la prospective de l'UNICEF. Ses recherches portent sur la justice pénale internationale, le droit international humanitaire, les droits humains et en particulier des enfants. Elle est aussi une praticienne du droit international reconnue, ayant travaillé depuis plus de 20 ans dans les affaires internationales.

Un entretien mené par Anaëlle Vergonjeanne.

Aptel, Cécile (2023). Atrocity Crimes, Children and International Criminal Courts: Killing Childhood. London : Routledge. 290 p. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003361015

Dans son ouvrage « Atrocity Crimes, Children and International Criminal Courts, Killing Childhood », Cécile Aptel nous offre un éclairage précieux sur la complexité de la justice pénale internationale en ce qui concerne les enfants. Son travail montre à quel point il est crucial de trouver un équilibre entre la protection des enfants en tant que victimes et la reconnaissance de leur capacité à agir dans des procédures pénales internationales. En dépit des défis et des failles observées, il est impératif que les juridictions pénales internationales et nationales, ainsi que les mécanismes de justice transitionnelle, continuent d’évoluer pour mieux prendre en compte les droits et la voix des enfants dans le cadre de la justice internationale. Un compte-rendu écrit de l’entretien a été publié dans le Journal du Multilatéralisme, consultable sur le site de l’Observatoire.