Tuesday, May 13, 2025
12:30-1:30pm ET
Virtual Event (Zoom)
Please join LPE@HLS as we host a special conversation between Vijayashri Sripati and Aziz Rana on Professor Sripati’s recent book, Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2024). The event will take place virtually on Zoom (webinar link here), and all are welcome!
About the Book
In Making Globalization Happen: The Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege, Vijayashri Sripati examines how American constitutional neoliberalism, and its attendant market logic, came to structure power relations on a global scale. The book recounts how, when, through which entities, and for what purposes economic globalization was catalyzed, assessing its effects on the Global South in general and South Asia in particular. Based on an innovative international constitutional political economy framework, Sripati sheds crucial light how the Western classical liberal constitution has shaped international legal developments in the post-colonial era. Making Globalization Happen links a comprehensive account of constitutional globalization to a broad range of UN family-created agendas, showing that underneath their surface were two contradictory yet interdependent trajectories: power, profit, and privilege for transnational capitalists, and debt, death, and despair for the Global South.
Speakers
Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College Law School. His work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding. His books include The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2010) and The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Vijayashri Sripati is a scholar of constitutional law, public international law, and international political economy. Most recently, she was a visiting scholar at the Trafficking and Social Justice Institute in the College of Health and Human Services at the University of Toledo, Ohio. Her books include Constitution-Making Under UN Auspices: Fostering Dependency in Sovereign Lands (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Making Globalization Happen: An Untold Story of Power, Profits, Privilege (Oxford University Press, 2024).
