Speakers

Biographies of Participants 

Speakers

Andreas Follesdal
Ph.D. (Harvard University 1991), Professor of Political Philosophy, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Co-Director of PluriCourts, a Centre of Excellence for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order. Principal Investigator, European Research Council Advanced Grant MultiRights 2011-16, on the Legitimacy of Multi-Level Human rights Judiciary. Follesdal publishes in the fields of political philosophy and international legal theory. Publications on federalism have addressed issues pertaining to the EU [2005, 2021], China [2008], Ethiopia [2021] and Nepal [2011, 2014], and on federalism as it relates to subsidiarity [2014]. He is also responsible for the entry on 'Federalism' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2003-2022].

André Lecours
Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His main research interests are nationalism and federalism. He is the editor of New Institutionalism. Theory and Analysis published by the University of Toronto Press in 2005, the author of Basque Nationalism and the Spanish State (University of Nevada Press, 2007), and the co-author (with Daniel Béland) of Nationalism and Social Policy. The Politics of Territorial Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Balveer Arora
Political scientist, currently Professor Emeritus and President, Center for Multilevel Federalism, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. He was a university teacher from 1973, a Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Political Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) New Delhi. He started teaching  political science in 1987 and was director of the Center of Political Studies at the School of Social Sciences, JNU for four years. Professor Arora was nominated for  "Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur" in 2011, after having received, in 2002, the rank of Officer in the Order of Academic Palms of the French Republic.

Baogang He
Alfred Deakin Professor, Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Chair in International Relations since 2005, at Deakin University, Australia. Graduated with a PhD in Political Science from Australian National University in 1994, Professor He has become widely known for his work in Chinese democratisation and politics, in particular deliberative politics in China. His recent books include Governing Taiwan and Tibet: Democratic Approaches (2015, Edinburgh University Press). He has also held several honorary appointments and research fellowships at renowned universities including Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, Leiden University and Sussex University, and was inaugural Head of Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Krishna Hachhethu
Professor of Political Science and faculty member of Central Department of Political Science, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal. He is author of one dozen books, including Party Building in Nepal (2002), Nepal in Transition (2008), State Building in Nepal (2009), Trajectory of Democracy in Nepal (2015), and has credit of publishing more than six dozen articles in books and journals published in Nepal and abroad. He was visiting scholar to Oxford University in 2005. He is a former member of the High Level Commission of State Restructuring of Nepal. Prof. Hachhethu is country coordinator of South Asia Democracy Study network. He has experiences of working with international organizations, i.e. International IDEA, DEFID, UNDP, NORAD, GF on several subjects like democracy, political party, governance, election, state restructuring.

Laura Allison-Reumann
Research Associate at the Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme at Nanyang Technological University, and an Associate Fellow at the EU Centre, Singapore. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Indonesia. Her research covers comparative regionalism, comparative federalism, and EU-ASEAN relations. She is the author of “The EU, ASEAN and Interregionalism: Regionalism Support and Norm Diffusion between the EU and ASEAN” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Michael G Breen
Former McKenzie Research Fellow, now lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne. Michael completed his PhD at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Michael's research focuses on federalism in Asia, and the management of ethnic diversity, with a special focus on the use of deliberative tools. He is the author of The Road to Federalism in Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka: Finding the Middle Ground (2018, Routledge) and has an extensive background in public policy and international development in Australia and Asia, including as an advisor to Nepal’s participatory constitution-making process.

Hugo Toudic
PhD student working on the legacy of Montesquieu's political philosophy among the Founding Fathers. His research aims at retracing the intellectual roots of American republicanism through a careful comparative reading of The Spirit of The Laws and The Federalist. His work is supported by the Joint PhD program between the CNRS and the University of Chicago. His advisors are Céline Spector (Sorbonne) and Paul Cheney (University of Chicago).

Timmayo Thumra
PhD student at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. Her research interests include governance (state and non-state), armed-conflict and transborder identities in the Naga areas of northeast India and Naga self-administered areas of Sagaing (Myanmar). Presently, she is a fully-funded PhD candidate, with Professor John Doyle, as her supervisor at DCU. She has a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Economics from St. Edmund’s College, (Shillong) India; and holds a Master’s degree in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). 

Discussants

Bernard Fournier

Professor at the Haute Ecole de la Province de Liège, after having been a Professor at the University of Liège (Belgium) and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). His current work deals with political behaviour in Canada and Europe, nationalism and identities, distributive justice and the role of the state, as well as, more globally, methodological and epistemological issues in social science.His latest collective work, edited with Raymond Hudon (Laval University) is Engagements citoyens et politiques de jeunes. Bilans et expériences au Canada et en Europe, Presses de l'université Laval, 2012. He also edited, with Professor Min Reuchamps, a book on Federalism in Belgium and Canada, Le fédéralisme en Belgique et au Canada: comparaison sociopolitique, Brussels, De Boeck University, 2009, coll. “Sociological openings”.

Constantine Vassiliou

Ph.D (University of Toronto, 2019), Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. His book manuscript, Montesquieu's Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment: Civic Honor For a Commercial in Transition, examines the place of honor in the foundational liberal theories of Montesquieu, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson. Dr. Vassiliou is the co-editor of a forthcoming book volume called The Spirit of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and he is currently working on an article entitled, "Benjamin Franklin and the Spirit of Montesquieu's Moderation at the Federal Convention of 1787".

David Dapice

Emeritus Professor of economics from Tufts University and the economist of the Vietnam and Myanmar Programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He has held the Vietnam position since 1990. The work on Myanmar was for the UNDP from 1995-1999, and with Proximity Designs from 2009- 2019. He first worked in Indonesia in 1971-73 for the Harvard Advisory Group and continued working on Southeast Asia and other regions with a year each at the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation. His work has ranged across development topics including agriculture, energy, health, poverty, and public finance. His most recent work has focused on Vietnam, Myanmar, and Indonesia.

Francesco Palermo

Professor of comparative constitutional law at the University of Verona and Head of the Institute for Comparative Federalism at Eurac Research in Bolzano/Bozen. President of the International Association of Centers for Federal Studies (IACFS), Constitutional Adviser to the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, member of the Scientific Committee of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Previously, he served as senior legal adviser to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, president of the Advisory Committee under the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and non-party member of the Italian Senate.

Loraine Kennedy

CNRS Research Director and member of the Center for South Asian Studies (CEIAS), EHESS. She has had a long-standing interest in federalism, starting from her PhD research, which examined Centre-State relations in Kerala with a focus on industrial development policies and planning. Her subsequent work investigated the impacts of the economic reforms of the 1990s on multi-level governance with a focus on subnational political arenas and policy-making. Her research on urban governance established the pre-eminent role that state governments play vis-à-vis municipal governments in shaping urban policies and space, mainly through the case of Hyderabad. She has written the chapter on federalism in the numerous editions of the leading French textbook on contemporary India, L’Inde contemporaine (1996, 2006, 2014, 2019 edited by Ch. Jaffrelot, Fayard), mapping how India’s peculiar form of federalism has evolved and adapted in relation to successive governing regimes. Her most recent publication with regard to federalism appeared in a special issue of SAMAJ on “The Hindutva Turn” (Dec 2020). Her article analyzed the state-level response to the Citizen Amendment Act 2019 and explored the extent to which federalism can act as a moderating force in the face of radical policy positions taken by the Union government. Since January 2021 she is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism in New Delhi.

Marie Lecomte-Tilouine

Senior researcher at CNRS and member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, CNRS/EHESS/Collège de France,and member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, CNRS/EHESS/Collège de France, Paris, France. She has coordinated several collective programs of research in Nepal and the Western Himalayas. Her recent books include: Hindu Kingship, Ethnic Revival and Maoist Rebellion in Nepal, OUP (2009, paperback 2010), (ed.) Bards and Mediums: History, Culture and Politics in the Central himalayan Kingdoms, Almora Book Depot, 2009, (ed.) Nature, Culture and Religion at the Crossroads of Asia, Delhi, SSP, 2010,  (ed.) Revolution in Nepal: An Anthropological and Historical Approach to the People's War, OUP, 2013, paperback) and Sacrifice et violence. Réflexions autour d’une ethnographie au Népal, Milan, Mimésis, 2021.

Philippe Ramirez

A social anthropologist affiliated to Centre for Himalayan Studies at CNRS (France). His early researches focused on the political anthropology of Nepal. He is currently carrying out research on the cultural complexity of North-East India, more particularly on the connections between descent and ethnicity. His recent publications include People of the Margins: Across Ethnic Boundaries in North-East India (2014) ; ‘Conversions, Population Movements and Ethno-Cultural Landscape in the Assam-Meghalaya Borderlands’. Asian Ethnicity 17 (3): 340–52 (2016); (with Stéphane Legendre) ‘Revisiting Asymmetric Marriage Rules’. Social Networks 52: 261–69 (2018) ; ‛The Religious Landscape of the Tiwa’ in Brill’s Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia (2021).

Stéphanie Tawa Lama

CNRS Senior fellow in political science, currently attached to the CSH in Delhi, with a long standing interest in local democracy and urban governance. Her publications on these topics include 2 books: (with Archana Ghosh) Democratization in Progress. Women and Local Politics in Urban India, Delhi, Tulika, 2005, 158 p. (with Joël Ruet); Governing India's Metropolises, Delhi, Routledge, 2009, 315 p  and several articles, including, lately: « Metropolitan democracy from below: participation and rescaling in Delhi », Territory, Politics, Governance, no 0 (5 novembre 2020): 1‑16.