in partnership with South Asia Center and Penn's Comparative Politics Workshop
About the Seminar:
A number of nations have instituted group-specific institutions as a mechanism to empower vulnerable groups. An assumption underpinning such bodies is that segregation of minority administrators will better serve the interests of in-groups. For instance, in specialized police stations or courts for women, citizens will be more likely to access justice in spaces removed from bias. Jassal uses the creation of women-only police stations in India to test whether such institutions do in fact assist victims of sexual violence or female administrators working within the police bureaucracy. He finds that "representation as separation" may be associated with certain unintended consequences.
About the Speaker:
Nirvikar Jassal is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development, Stanford University. His research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict and hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and Asian Survey. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of California—Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and New York City government.