Itty Abraham
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3686786 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Itty Abraham |
| NOMBRES | Itty |
| APELLIDO | Abraham |
| FIRMA | ABRAHAM I |
| AFILIACIONES | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1604-0002 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 32 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 90 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 32 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1992 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Space, Technology, and Visions of National Progress in India
India’s space program attracted international admiration in 2023 for becoming the first country to successfully land a craft on the moon’s south pole. The program is now in its sixth decade and stands as one of India’s most successful technology missions, not least for the hard currency revenues it generates. The reasons for this success are less well known: they include inspired early leadership, considerable foreign assistance, a strategic deci…
Ploughshares and Swords
Impermanence, Hybridity, Violence
This short essay explores some of the issues at stake when science and technology studies (STS) are situated within a global frame. Global, in this reading, is both historical and aspirational. As historical, it rejects the East-West dichotomy, insisting instead on one world as the outcome of multiple unequal and uneven world-making processes. As aspirational, to consider what a global STS would look like this essay imagines a world where technol…
Contesting the Universality of the Refugee Convention
Recent scholarship has insightfully explored the colonial roots of the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. In this work I seek to extend this line of argument by situating the adoption of the Additional Protocol of the Refugee Convention (1967) in relation to the transformations of international order following the Second World War. Contra the conventional account, this article shows that the Additional Protocol was created in no small part due to fea…
The future of a promise and the promise of a future
This response to Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s essay reflects on the following themes: state promises made and broken, comparing India and China, and science fiction as national redemption
Immanent Nation
This paper lies at the intersection of scholarly literatures on forced migration, politically engaged diasporas, and the use of online platforms and digital technologies for political ends. It follows the efforts of a group of Rohingya diasporic activists using a variety of means, online and offline, to contest the claims and authority of Myanmar, an established territorial state. Their actions can be subsumed into two kinds of politics, a politi…
Notes & Comment
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
Prehistory of Aadhaar
This article seeks to go beyond the binary of elite concerns over privacy versus subaltern desires for recognition to understand the huge Indian biometric project, Aadhaar. It offers a prehistory of Aadhaar, framed not in terms of rights and wrongs, important as they are, but as the most recent project in the shaping of modern social and political power through the technologically mediated intersection of the law and the body. Key moments of tech…
Shirley Sun, Socio-economics of Personalized Medicine in Asia
The Andamans as a “sea of islands”
The rise of military and political tensions in the Indo-Pacific maritime zone has brought new attention to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. With this visibility has come a disturbing awareness in some quarters that this Indian archipelago is qualitatively different from the rest of the country. Whether defined in terms of unorthodox cultural practices or the unauthorized presence of other national bodies, the multicultural habitus of the Andamans…
Decolonizing arms control
This article seeks to contribute to a global history of disarmament by arguing for the importance of a largely forgotten moment in the history of arms control, namely, the report on the legality of nuclear testing issued by the Asian African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC) in 1964. By focusing on the legality of nuclear testing during peacetime, the AALCC report was able to advance its objective of delegitimizing the possession of nuclear we…
From the Commission to the Mission Model
This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India-atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications-and shows …
What (really) makes a country nuclear? Insights from nonnuclear Southeast Asia
Beginning with the question ‘what makes a country nuclear?’, this article goes on to argue that nuclearity is produced by the powerful formulations of a ‘totalitarian’ nuclear discourse. To break out of this conceptual box, I explore the nuclear histories of two seemingly nonnuclear countries, Thailand and Philippines, adopting a genealogical approach to the study of nuclear power. Paying close attention to the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowled…
State Power and Technological Citizenship in India
In this article we seek to nuance our understanding of the technologically mediated relationship of state and citizen, first, by framing these relations in terms of Michel Foucault's ideas about state power and governmentality, and, second, by using case studies drawn from the Indian experience to highlight particular risks associated with digital governance and biopolitics. An overview of state and social technological interventions in India sho…
Germany Has Become Mohammedan’
The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British…
Being Nuclear
Reviewed by: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht Itty Abraham (bio) Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. By Gabrielle Hecht. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+452. $29.95. What makes something nuclear? What marks the boundaries of the nuclear world? These foundational questions are rarely, if ever, asked by nuclear scholars. In her response, Gabrielle Hecht, a prizewinning historian of th…
Clashing cultures of science
Geopolitics and Biopolitics in India’s High Natural Background Radiation Zone
This article explores the tensions between the statist project of securing national bodies—geopolitics—and the governmental project of securing populations—biopolitics. It is based on historical, public health, and ethnographic evidence from a coastal region of India with high background radiation, due to large deposits of thorium in beach sands. Thorium is a critical resource in the Indian state’s long-term programme of energy independence; long…
Segurança /Security in Brazil and the United States
Words in Motion
On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings freq…
From Bandung to NAM
This article seeks to clarify the relationship between non-alignment as the most distinctive feature of Indian foreign policy thinking during the Cold War and India's interest in helping form the non-aligned movement (NAM). Precisely because of the early success of its independent non-aligned policy, India's decision to join and help shape the non-aligned movement needs explaining. This article offers new historical evidence to argue that India's…
Ordering International Politics
Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force. By Janice Bially Mattern. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 303p. $25.95. Janice Bially Mattern's impressive first book comes with all barrels loaded. Although her subtitle suggests that she will take on the usual suspects, realist power-politics and neoliberal common-interest approaches, she also includes a critique of the approach closest to her own, namely, cons…
The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories
This chapter argues that a discourse of “control,” authored by the overlapping narratives of academic proliferation studies and U.S. anti‐proliferation policy, has come to dominate our understanding of nuclear histories. This discourse, with its primary purpose of seeking to predict which countries are likely to build nuclear weapons and thereby to threaten the prevailing military‐strategic status quo, has narrowed the gaze of nuclear historians.…
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
Read an excerpt from the book
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
Words in Motion
On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings freq…
From Bandung to NAM
This article seeks to clarify the relationship between non-alignment as the most distinctive feature of Indian foreign policy thinking during the Cold War and India's interest in helping form the non-aligned movement (NAM). Precisely because of the early success of its independent non-aligned policy, India's decision to join and help shape the non-aligned movement needs explaining. This article offers new historical evidence to argue that India's…
Immanent Nation
This paper lies at the intersection of scholarly literatures on forced migration, politically engaged diasporas, and the use of online platforms and digital technologies for political ends. It follows the efforts of a group of Rohingya diasporic activists using a variety of means, online and offline, to contest the claims and authority of Myanmar, an established territorial state. Their actions can be subsumed into two kinds of politics, a politi…
The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories
This chapter argues that a discourse of “control,” authored by the overlapping narratives of academic proliferation studies and U.S. anti‐proliferation policy, has come to dominate our understanding of nuclear histories. This discourse, with its primary purpose of seeking to predict which countries are likely to build nuclear weapons and thereby to threaten the prevailing military‐strategic status quo, has narrowed the gaze of nuclear historians.…
Landscape and postcolonial science
This article draws attention to the framing of problems in the history and sociology of Indian science. It argues that physics in postcolonial India cannot be seen in isolation from the political context within which it was embedded and the international circuits within which its work circulated. Further, the article demonstrates how certain experi mental approaches, highly effective from a scientific point of view, depend upon a violent exclusio…
India's 'Strategic Enclave
The Indian security complex has become a diversified set of establishments, which have grown up around two models. The first model is based on a top-down system, less suited to technological innovation and development, which concentrates on licensed production and production for the civilian market. The second model is a flexible, project-oriented system, which has been able to produce both a nuclear device and ballistic missiles. This article ex…
Decolonizing arms control
This article seeks to contribute to a global history of disarmament by arguing for the importance of a largely forgotten moment in the history of arms control, namely, the report on the legality of nuclear testing issued by the Asian African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC) in 1964. By focusing on the legality of nuclear testing during peacetime, the AALCC report was able to advance its objective of delegitimizing the possession of nuclear we…
What (really) makes a country nuclear? Insights from nonnuclear Southeast Asia
Beginning with the question ‘what makes a country nuclear?’, this article goes on to argue that nuclearity is produced by the powerful formulations of a ‘totalitarian’ nuclear discourse. To break out of this conceptual box, I explore the nuclear histories of two seemingly nonnuclear countries, Thailand and Philippines, adopting a genealogical approach to the study of nuclear power. Paying close attention to the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowled…
Germany Has Become Mohammedan’
The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British…
Contesting the Universality of the Refugee Convention
Recent scholarship has insightfully explored the colonial roots of the UN Refugee Convention of 1951. In this work I seek to extend this line of argument by situating the adoption of the Additional Protocol of the Refugee Convention (1967) in relation to the transformations of international order following the Second World War. Contra the conventional account, this article shows that the Additional Protocol was created in no small part due to fea…
Notes & Comment
SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthrop…
From the Commission to the Mission Model
This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India-atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications-and shows …
Science and Power in the Postcolonial State
India's 'Strategic Enclave
The Indian security complex has become a diversified set of establishments, which have grown up around two models. The first model is based on a top-down system, less suited to technological innovation and development, which concentrates on licensed production and production for the civilian market. The second model is a flexible, project-oriented system, which has been able to produce both a nuclear device and ballistic missiles. This article ex…
Science and Power in the Postcolonial State
Nuclear power and human security
This article argues against the conventional wisdom of taking the alleged success of cold war deterrence as a viable model for South Asia. It notes that we are only beginning to fully understand the costs of the cold war, costs that are incommensurate with a logic that argues that since a nuclear exchange did not take place between the United States and the former Soviet Union, it provides a credible model for India and Pakistan to follow. The ar…
Landscape and postcolonial science
This article draws attention to the framing of problems in the history and sociology of Indian science. It argues that physics in postcolonial India cannot be seen in isolation from the political context within which it was embedded and the international circuits within which its work circulated. Further, the article demonstrates how certain experi mental approaches, highly effective from a scientific point of view, depend upon a violent exclusio…
The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb
India's Nuclear Bomb
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
Read an excerpt from the book
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things
A Southern Route from West to East
(2005). A Southern Route from West to East. NACLA Report on the Americas: Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 28-32
Ordering International Politics
Ordering International Politics: Identity, Crisis, and Representational Force. By Janice Bially Mattern. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 303p. $25.95. Janice Bially Mattern's impressive first book comes with all barrels loaded. Although her subtitle suggests that she will take on the usual suspects, realist power-politics and neoliberal common-interest approaches, she also includes a critique of the approach closest to her own, namely, cons…
The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories
This chapter argues that a discourse of “control,” authored by the overlapping narratives of academic proliferation studies and U.S. anti‐proliferation policy, has come to dominate our understanding of nuclear histories. This discourse, with its primary purpose of seeking to predict which countries are likely to build nuclear weapons and thereby to threaten the prevailing military‐strategic status quo, has narrowed the gaze of nuclear historians.…
From Bandung to NAM
This article seeks to clarify the relationship between non-alignment as the most distinctive feature of Indian foreign policy thinking during the Cold War and India's interest in helping form the non-aligned movement (NAM). Precisely because of the early success of its independent non-aligned policy, India's decision to join and help shape the non-aligned movement needs explaining. This article offers new historical evidence to argue that India's…
Segurança /Security in Brazil and the United States
Words in Motion
On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings freq…
Geopolitics and Biopolitics in India’s High Natural Background Radiation Zone
This article explores the tensions between the statist project of securing national bodies—geopolitics—and the governmental project of securing populations—biopolitics. It is based on historical, public health, and ethnographic evidence from a coastal region of India with high background radiation, due to large deposits of thorium in beach sands. Thorium is a critical resource in the Indian state’s long-term programme of energy independence; long…
Being Nuclear
Reviewed by: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht Itty Abraham (bio) Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. By Gabrielle Hecht. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+452. $29.95. What makes something nuclear? What marks the boundaries of the nuclear world? These foundational questions are rarely, if ever, asked by nuclear scholars. In her response, Gabrielle Hecht, a prizewinning historian of th…
Clashing cultures of science
State Power and Technological Citizenship in India
In this article we seek to nuance our understanding of the technologically mediated relationship of state and citizen, first, by framing these relations in terms of Michel Foucault's ideas about state power and governmentality, and, second, by using case studies drawn from the Indian experience to highlight particular risks associated with digital governance and biopolitics. An overview of state and social technological interventions in India sho…
Germany Has Become Mohammedan’
The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British…
What (really) makes a country nuclear? Insights from nonnuclear Southeast Asia
Beginning with the question ‘what makes a country nuclear?’, this article goes on to argue that nuclearity is produced by the powerful formulations of a ‘totalitarian’ nuclear discourse. To break out of this conceptual box, I explore the nuclear histories of two seemingly nonnuclear countries, Thailand and Philippines, adopting a genealogical approach to the study of nuclear power. Paying close attention to the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowled…
From the Commission to the Mission Model
This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India-atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications-and shows …
Prehistory of Aadhaar
This article seeks to go beyond the binary of elite concerns over privacy versus subaltern desires for recognition to understand the huge Indian biometric project, Aadhaar. It offers a prehistory of Aadhaar, framed not in terms of rights and wrongs, important as they are, but as the most recent project in the shaping of modern social and political power through the technologically mediated intersection of the law and the body. Key moments of tech…
Shirley Sun, Socio-economics of Personalized Medicine in Asia
The Andamans as a “sea of islands”
The rise of military and political tensions in the Indo-Pacific maritime zone has brought new attention to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. With this visibility has come a disturbing awareness in some quarters that this Indian archipelago is qualitatively different from the rest of the country. Whether defined in terms of unorthodox cultural practices or the unauthorized presence of other national bodies, the multicultural habitus of the Andamans…
Decolonizing arms control
This article seeks to contribute to a global history of disarmament by arguing for the importance of a largely forgotten moment in the history of arms control, namely, the report on the legality of nuclear testing issued by the Asian African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC) in 1964. By focusing on the legality of nuclear testing during peacetime, the AALCC report was able to advance its objective of delegitimizing the possession of nuclear we…
Political science (28 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Politics (19 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Political economy (10 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · History (9 obras) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (8 obras) · Nuclear Issues and Defense (8 obras)