About the Lecture
What does it mean to claim rights without recognition? And what happens to sovereignty when statehood remains perpetually deferred? States in Waiting traced how political movements in South Asia and beyond navigated a twentieth‑century international order in which external recognition, rather than territorial control alone, determined access to statehood. Highlighting Northeast India—a region characterized by porous borders, insurgent movements, and overlapping claims to authority—the book showed how nationalist movements collaborated with advocacy networks to articulate claims to rights, autonomy, and self‑determination. In doing so, these struggles reveal a persistent tension between aspirations towards universal rights and an international system that privileges recognized sovereignty.
This lecture moves beyond that framework by returning to the unresolved questions at the heart of the book’s conclusion. If recognition remains uneven, delayed, or denied, what alternative forms of political belonging emerge? If sovereignty can be suspended, fragmented, or deferred, how should we understand the temporalities of the international order itself? By foregrounding these open questions, this lecture argues that states‑in‑waiting are not anomalies of a colonial past, but enduring features of a global present in which rights, recognition, and sovereignty continue to be contested, renegotiated, and reimagined.
About the Speaker
Lydia Walker is the Seth Andre Myers Chair in Global Military History and a Provost Scholar Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University. She is a historian of twentieth‑century global decolonization whose work spans South Asia, Southern Africa, military intervention, and insurgent resistance. She is the author of States‑in‑Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which received the 2025 Busuttil Prize and Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society, and has published in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD and AM from Harvard and a BA from Columbia, and has held visiting or research fellowships at Dartmouth College, the Institute of Historical Research, the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (New Delhi), Leiden University, and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
To join online, register here.