Nikita Sud
Professor of the Politics of Development, University of Oxford
The Global South in the Climate Emergency
The Global South has been forged through a shared history of European colonisation, and through a geography of racial distance. While its heterogeneous postcolonial nations are on different development trajectories, they share structural disadvantages emerging from their exploitative past. Southern nations have used their collective identity to bargain for climate reparations at global climate fora. In my presentation I will dwell on the South as a strategic coalition on the global stage, while also analysing some challenges facing Southern states and societies in climate critical contexts in Asia.
Speaker Bio
Nikita Sud’s research and teaching is centered on the politics of development; the sociology and politics of climate change and green energy; and the changing nature of the state in the global South.In recent research, Nikita delves into development theory, especially the construct of the global South (see Sud and Sanchez-Ancochea, 2022). She is also undertaking comparative research on the climate crisis, and institutional and political responses to this in South and Southeast Asia. Her work explores the transition to renewable energy, and the institutional, political and financial mechanisms that underlie this in regions that are geostrategically crucial, while being environmentally highly vulnerable. Nikita convenes an MPhil course on ‘climate questions from the global South’. She is keen to supervise critical social science research on the politics of climate change and energy transition, with a focus on Asia.
Nikita has for long studied the socially entangled life of land. In research conducted in west, east and south India, she explored ideas and theories of land. The latter were put in conversation with processes of land-making in relation to state-, politics- and market-making. Alongside publications in Geography, Environment, Development Studies, and Agrarian Studies journals, this research is encapsulated in the monograph The Making of Land and The Making of India ( Oxford University Press, 2021). Previously, she has written on the Indian state. Her long-term research resulted in her 2012 book, Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat, which was widely reviewed. She is a recipient of an Oxford University Teaching Excellence Award, the Sanjaya Lall Prize, and a Falling Walls Social Science award. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Peasant Studies, Economy and Society, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Area Development and Policy.
