A special event that was held FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2002 at International House, U.C. Berkeley, as part of the Center for South Asia Studies' 17th Annual Conference.

May 2003: A video of this event is now available as a webcast at the following URL:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events/details.html?event_id=74

Kashmir and Afghanistan: Religion, Ethnicity and the Strategic Balance in South Asia

Khaled Ahmed, Journalist, The Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan
Pradeep Chhibber, Political Science, U.C. Berkeley
Sumit Ganguly, Asian Studies and Government, University of Texas/Austin
Neil Joeck, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State
Saeed Shafqat, Quaid-e-Azam Distinguished Professor, Columbia University

This event was free and open to the public. For more information, please see the Center for South Asia Studies' home page: http://www.ias.berkeley.edu/southasia

KASHMIR AND AFGHANISTAN: RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND THE STRATEGIC BALANCE IN SOUTH ASIA

The Center for South Asia Studies announces a discussion of Kashmir and Afghanistan in conjunction with its 17th Annual South Asia Conference at Berkeley to be held at the International House Auditorium at 6:00 pm on Friday, February 15, 2002. The discussants will include: Khaled Ahmed of The Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan; Pradeep Chhibber, Political Science, UC Berkeley; Sumit Ganguly, Asian Studies and Government, University of Texas, Austin; Neil Joeck, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State; Saeed Shafqat, Quaid-e-Azam Professor of Pakistan Studies, Columbia University.

Khaled Ahmed is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times, Lahore and is one of the best known political analysts writing in the Pakistani press today. Although widely recognized for his weekly column in The Friday Times, Khaled Ahmed contributes regularly to a number of papers and journals in Pakistan and India. Mr. Ahmed writes about current events, Pakistani politics (events, parties and individuals), Muslims in the diaspora, and a wide range of other topics. He works regularly with other journalists in defense of press freedoms and is involved in the publishing of books on social, cultural and developmental themes of contemporary relevance in English and Urdu. He was an Editor of The Frontier Post from 1990-1993, and he was a founding member of the Neemrana track-two dialogue with India in 1990.

Pradeep Chhibber is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the holder of the Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his M.Phil from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to coming to Berkeley he taught at the University of Michigan and Ohio State University. His research is focused around political parties and the role of economic policy in the making of national politics, and federalism. He is currently working on trying to understand why the different state governments of India provide varying amounts of public goods to their citizens. Professor Chhibber is the author of Democracy without Associations: Transformations of Party Systems and Social Cleavages in India (University of Michigan Press, 1998)

Sumit Ganguly is a Professor of Asian Studies and Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He has previously taught at James Madison College at Michigan State University, Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Columbia University. Professor Ganguly has been a Fellow and Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He is the author or editor of eight books on South Asian politics. His most recent book is Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (Columbia University Press, 2002). Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Survey, Current History and the Journal of Strategic Studies and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York) and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (London). He has recently taken on the editorship of a new, refereed social science journal devoted to the study of modern India, The India Review, to be published by Frank Cass and Company, London.

Neil Joeck is a political analyst in the Directorate for Nonproliferation Arms Control, and International Security at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) in California. He is also a Research Associate of the LLNL Center for Global Security Research and the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Joeck is on assignment for two years with the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State. In 1999 he served as a consultant to the Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Dr. Joeck received his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA, where he was awarded a Graham Fellowship and an IGCC Predoctoral Fellowship. He was a member of two Council on Foreign Relations Task Forces on South Asia in 1996 and 1998 which produced the monographs A New U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan and After the Tests: U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan. His publications include Maintaining Nuclear Stability in South Asia, Adelphi Paper #312 (Oxford University Press, 1997) and two edited books Arms Control and International Security (with Roman Kolkowicz, Westview Press, 1984) and Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia (Frank Cass, 1986). He has contributed articles to Comparative Strategy, Strategic Survey, Journal of Strategic Studies, Energy and Technology Review, the International Herald Tribune, and various chapters to edited books.

Saeed Shafqat, the Quaid-e-Azam Distinguished Professor at Columbia University, did his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania after earlier degrees at the University of the Punjab, Lahore. Prof. Shafqat was the founder of and former Chairman of the Department of Pakistan Studies established in 1973 at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. He has also served as the Chief Instructor and Professor of Pakistan Studies at the Civil Services Academy, Lahore. Prof. Shafqat’s primary research interests are in the areas of comparative politics, public policy (democracy, governance and institutional reforms) and international politics relating to South Asia.Prof. Shafqat is the author of Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan (Westview Press, Boulder, 1997) and Political System of Pakistan and Public Policy (Progressive Publishers, Lahore, 1989) and the editor of Contemporary Issues in Pakistan Studies (Gautam Publishers, Lahore, 2nd ed. 1998). Recent consultancies for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad (SDPI) have resulted in Perspectives on Corruption in Pakistan: A Pilot study (SDPI, 1999); Water Sector Management in Punjab: Improving Governance of Irrigation (ADB, 2000); Governance in Pakistan: Challenges, Issues, Reform, Efforts and Prospects (ADB, 2000).

last revised May 19, 2003

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