Oxford South Asian Society and the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme at the University of Oxford are pleased to organise a book discussion on Mayur Suresh’s Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham University Press 2023). In Terror Trials, Mayur studies the lives of people accused of terrorism offences in Delhi’s Tis Hazari courts. The book shows that the everyday life of terrorism trials in India are not only marked by ideas of the ‘state of exception’, the expansion of the security state, or nationalism, but also by legal technicalities.
Anchored by Terror Trials, this discussion will aim to have a broader conversation about terror trials in India and the rest of South Asia.
Date & Time: 4:00pm, Tuesday, 25 April 2023
Venue: Room 9, Level 1, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
PANELISTS
Zoha Waseem
Dr Zoha Waseem is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick (UK) and Co-Coordinator of the international network of academics, the Urban Violence Research Network. She is the author of the book Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi (Hurst/OUP 2022) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security, and Social Order (Bristol University Press 2023).
Abdullah Azzam
Abdullah Azzam is a DPhil (Law) candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. His research broadly engages with counter-terrorism legislations in India and the debates surrounding constitutionalism and the state of exception. Specifically, his doctoral research examines the prosecution of terrorism-related cases in India's National Investigation Agency's (NIA) Special Courts, analyzing how this has led to the evolution of a parallel criminal justice system and systemic exclusion of Muslims and other minorities.
Mayur Suresh (Author)
Mayur is a Senior Lecturer in Law and has taught at SOAS since 2015. He holds a BA LLB (Hons) from National Law School of India, Bangalore (2004), an LLM from Columbia Law School (2006) and a PhD in law from Birkbeck, University of London (2017). Mayur's research is based on ethnographic fieldwork terrorism cases that took place in Delhi’s trial courts. His book Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts (Fordham University Press, 2023) is derived from this research. More broadly, his research seeks to bring an anthropological perspective to the study of legal processes.
