Sharath Srinivasan

Sharath Srinivasan
University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Politics and International Studies

Doctor of Philosophy

About

50
Publications
20,632
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
275
Citations

Publications

Publications (50)
Article
Full-text available
Amartya Sen has critiqued theories of justice in the liberal tradition for not focusing on actual human living and failing to be truly egalitarian. However, in the absence of a theoretical approach of his own that comprehensively links capabilities and social justice, others have criticised him for not telling us exactly which capabilities should b...
Article
Full-text available
The digital transformations taking place across the African continent present an urgent need for fresh thinking in the study of publics. This introduction lays out the impetus and contribution of this Special Issue to such a rethinking of the study of publics in Africa. Following in the footsteps of a wider body of scholarship, we draw on Africa’s...
Chapter
Full-text available
Opening Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan, this chapter introduces the book’s key concepts: peace and peacemaking. The contributions in this volume show that ideas of peace have been contested in the Sudans, and that different modalities of peacemaking have both gone together and have competed with each other. This chapter draws on...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines what drives audience participation in interactive broadcast shows, with implications for the democratic potential of these shows as spaces of citizen engagement and public discussion. It makes three contributions, the first two to audience and media studies and the last to political communication. First, it provides evidence t...
Article
Full-text available
Radio shows which invite audience participation via short message service (SMS)-interactive radio-SMS-can be designed as a mixed methods approach for applied social research during COVID-19 and other crises in low and middle income countries. In the aftermath of a cholera outbreak in Somalia, we illustrate how this method provides social insights t...
Chapter
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Chapter
Full-text available
Assembly means many things in politics, but it tends to mean some things more than others. In common parlance, peaceful assembly evokes acts of counterpower or protest. Conversely, in many countries, the assembly is also an institution of representative government. However, a global historical survey of assembly underscores more variety in assembly...
Article
Full-text available
Breaking from big tech, civic activists, and human rights advocates working with technology are envisioning data, platforms and intelligent systems aligned with pluralism and solidarity. These experiences are inspiring valuable reflections not only for those working at the intersection of technology and human rights but also for anyone who wants to...
Article
Full-text available
Across Africa, the deployment of digital solutions such as track and trace apps and vaccine passports to tackle COVID‐19 largely failed in their public health objectives. Yet, in the process, these material interventions revealed and unleashed new potentialities of governance throughout the continent. This article examines these developments and th...
Chapter
Full-text available
‘Deal with me, here I stand!’ were words that Christof Heyns used to convey the drama inherent in many forms of assembly and protest. Central to so much of Christof’s work – including his doctoral research on civil disobedience in South Africa and his captivation with the example of Mahatma Gandhi in struggles against injustice and colonialism – wa...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Unending’, shows how the book’s central arguments are equally pertinent to recurrent wars and multiple peacemaking in Sudan and South Sudan from the CPA until the present. From the tendency towards quick-fix peacemaking initiatives in Darfur, piecemeal peacemaking in Sudan’s east, and the making and breaking of Sudan’s ‘Kashmir’ in A...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Lying’, examines how peacemakers respond to renewed violence during peace negotiations and the implications for recurrent war and non-violent politics. Specifically, it investigates how and why foreign peacemakers misrepresented the political dimensions of Darfur’s violence for a critical year when war broke out and escalated rapidly...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter introduces the theoretical orientation of When Peace Kill Politics for interrogating peacemaking in civil wars and the different attempts to explain failed peacemaking in the Sudans. The chapter critiques mainstream peacemaking scholarship – from bargain approaches in realist and strategic studies to liberal democratic constitutionalis...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Resisting’ , unravels how negotiating Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the early years of conflict in Darfur were entwined. It examines how a simplified ‘north-south’ deal sought by foreign peacemakers was resisted by the SPLM/A through surrogate violence in Darfur. The chapter argues that the logics of peacemaking may give...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Making’, analyses the genesis of Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in order to answer the question, what does it mean to ‘make’ peace? Making necessitates having ends in mind, but not only ones that textbook theories propose. The chapter examines how in Sudan a messy and contingent multiplicity of divergent and conflicting f...
Chapter
The book’s conclusion insists that we must not start with the question of ‘what should we do differently?’ but rather ‘how might we think differently (about peacemaking in civil war)?’ Having rebuffed solutions of crude design and the dangers of reducing politics to modes of making, there can be no neat and easy answers. Inspired by what the Postsc...
Chapter
The book’s Postscript considers the monumental events in Sudan in 2019, from the deposing of President al-Bashir under the pressure of a popular uprising to citizen demands for civilian rule, from the vantage point of the arguments of this book. The Postscript allows for the Arendtian approach to politics, which anchors the peacemaking critique in...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Hollowing’, examines how means-end peacemaking may have withering effects on post-agreement political change. Examining politics in northern Sudan after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the chapter explains the role of peacemaking in the institutionalization of authoritarian rule and the constraining of plural civil politics t...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Unbounding’, illuminates the opposition between peace as a project of making and the founding or refounding of a political community through civil political action. The chapter examines how peacemaking was implicated in South Sudan’s violent failure as a new political community. Without diminishing domestic elite political responsibi...
Chapter
This chapter, ‘Simplifying’, probes the pathologies of a central means of making peace in civil war. In any project of ‘making’, designs aim towards simplicity. In peacemaking, a neat make-do design first involves reductively naming a politically complex reality to make a solvable problem. Yet design-based simplifications collide with the complexit...
Article
Full-text available
Background Authorities in Somalia responded with drastic measures after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in mid-March 2020, closing borders, schools, limiting travel and prohibiting most group functions. However, the impact of the pandemic in Somalia thereafter remained unclear. This study employs a novel remote qualitative research method in a co...
Book
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/peace-kills-politics/ Why have war and coercion dominated the political realm in the Sudans, a decade since South Sudan's independence and fifteen years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement? This book explains the tragic role of international peacemaking in reproducing violence and political authoritarianis...
Book
Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended over two decades of civil war and led to South Sudan's independence. Peacemaking that brought about the agreement and then sought to sustain it involved, alongside the Sudanese, an array of regional and western states as well as international organisations. This was a landmark effort to create and...
Chapter
Full-text available
Opening Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan , this chapter introduces the book’s key concepts: peace and peacemaking. The contributions in this volume show that ideas of peace have been contested in the Sudans, and that different modalities of peacemaking have both gone together and have competed with each other. This chapter draws o...
Article
Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ended over two decades of civil war and led to South Sudan’s independence. Peacemaking that brought about the agreement and then sought to sustain it involved, alongside the Sudanese, an array of regional and western states as well as international organisations. This was a landmark effort to create and...
Research
Full-text available
The Right of Peaceful Assembly in Online Spaces: A Comment on the Revised Draft General Comment No. 37 on Article 21 (Right of Peaceful Assembly) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Submission by Michael Hamilton, Suzanne Dixon and Jennifer Young (University of East Anglia) and Ella McPherson, Sharath Srinivasan, Eleanor Sal...
Article
Full-text available
Opening Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan, this chapter introduces the book’s key concepts: peace and peacemaking. The contributions in this volume show that ideas of peace have been contested in the Sudans, and that different modalities of peacemaking have both gone together and have competed with each other. This chapter draws on...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This Research Pack, on the right of peaceful assembly online, is the outcome of an interdisciplinary collaboration between staff and students at Cambridge’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights and the University of East Anglia Law School. We initially produced this research as background for an expert meeting convened in December 2019 at the Univ...
Article
Full-text available
From global amplifications of local protests on social media to disinformation campaigns and transformative state surveillance capabilities, digital communications are changing the ways in which politics works in Africa and how and with whom power accrues. Yet while digital information technology and media are relatively new, the role of communica­...
Article
Full-text available
Scholars of media and politics mostly recognise that audiences and publics are constructed, but fall short of explaining precisely how their indeterminate and imagined nature can be the basis of their political significance. Interactive broadcast media provides a valuable empirical lens for inquiring into why this may be case. The convergence of ne...
Article
Full-text available
The convergence of newer digital communication technologies with more established radio and television broadcasts is shifting opportunities for news media to impact upon citizen-state relations. These nascent possibilities are pronounced on the African continent, where mobile telephony and increasingly plural media landscapes have given rise to pop...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this chapter, we reflect on opportunities to expand citizen engagement in developing world contexts using digital technologies and interactive broadcast media. Taking seriously the need for a reality check that gives emphasis to valuing human voice, to actual social realities and to technologies in use, we guard against the latest technological...
Chapter
Full-text available
Civil society, in a shape or form that makes sense in diverse African contexts, matters greatly to African political futures. This chapter examines why international efforts to support civil society in Africa and to address violent conflict and its consequences have often not met the objectives set out for them. Yet a mere critique of failed top-do...
Technical Report
Full-text available
During 2015 and early 2016, Africa’s Voices Foundation, a spin-off from Cambridge University’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights, worked with UNICEF Somalia on an innovative citizen engagement and social data pilot. Eight interactive, or two-way, radio shows, implemented by project partner Free Press Unlimited, engaged Somalis across South Cent...
Article
Full-text available
This material was presented at a Meeting of Experts convened at CGHR by the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Prof. Christof Heyns, to study the question of the Safety of Journalists from 1-2 March 2012.
Article
Full-text available
A decade ago international peacemakers turned a blind eye when violence in Darfur, Sudan, first escalated into civil war. This article addresses the war's brutal beginnings, using a close reading of internal communications, interviews, and public statements to deepen our understanding of the predicament that key peacemakers found themselves in, and...
Article
Full-text available
Journalists play a central role in fostering a society based on the open discussion of facts and the pursuit of the truth, as opposed to one based on rumor, prejudice, and the naked exercise of power. As a result, journalists are often literally in the line of fire and deserve special protection. This article considers the characteristics of deadly...
Chapter
Full-text available
MOST CONTEMPORARY ARMED CONFLICTS IN AFRICA END WITH negotiated settlements, and peace negotiations lay important foundations for peacebuilding. Yet peace negotiations straddle awkwardly the immediate desire to end violence and aspirations for forging a more lasting yet underdetermined "peace." The latter imperative assumes greater prominence in co...
Thesis
Full-text available
This thesis follows two equally important lines of inquiry. First, it offers a detailed account of the politics of peace negotiations in Sudan between the late 1990s and 2004, when the country's two decades-long second civil war reached a mediated settlement, but large-scale violence erupted in the western region of Darfur. Second, it proposes a ne...
Article
but not offered one of his own that would link capabilities and justice.2 This paper examines Sen's silence on justice and finds that at the heart of the matter is a complex interdependent relationship between justice and democracy in Sen's work. The latter, central to Sen's concern for agency, choice and plurality, is flawed in Sen's elaboration i...

Network

Cited By