<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

International Relations and Governance Studies

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

How to decentre Aberystwyth and tell a critical, multilocational IR story

World University root node

Perspectives on Politics

The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. By Helena Rosenblatt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 368p. $35.00 cloth.

Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (Eds), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917–1939, New Delhi, SAGE Publications, 2015, xli + 274 pp., ₹723, ISBN-10: 8132119797/ ISBN-13: 978-8132119791.

Fulltext

Social Change

Book Review: Ali Raza, Franziska Roy and Benjamin Zachariah (Eds), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views, 1917–1939

India's landmark 2014 election brought Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power with a broad mandate to reshape the country's foreign policy. His sophistication in this realm has surprised many, but current Indian foreign policy is also influenced by both structural domestic factors that pre-date his term and new actors who seek to gain influence or expand their roles. This report explores the effect of domestic influence on Indian foreign policy by outlining the growing links between domestic dynamics and India's international aspirations. It highlights five new domestic determinants of foreign policy decision-making in light of the BJP election victory in 2014. It also discusses five significant challenges that domestic factors pose to India's ability to turn its international aspirations into reality. These factors indicate that even Modi's historic mandate may not be enough to insulate his government from domestic forces – both allies and antagonists – that wish to shape foreign policy. The report concludes with thoughts on how these aspirations and challenges influence the playing field on which foreign policy decisions are currently made in India and may manifest themselves in the policy realm.

SSRN Electronic Journal

The Evolving Domestic Drivers of Indian Foreign Policy

Studies in Indian Politics

What does the international mean? IR's deep ontology and the promise it holds

This dictionary provides a comprehensive and ready guide to the key concepts, issues, persons and technologies related to the nuclear programmes of India and Pakistan and other South Asian states. This will serve as a useful reference especially as the nuclear issue continues to be an important domestic and international policy concern.

Nuclear South Asia: Keywords and concepts

This article critically examines indigenism in the field of International Relations (IR) in India. Indigenism involves a claim that a select corpus of resources from early India—‘indigenous historical knowledge'— is relevant for understanding contemporary India's politics and international relations. It is also projected as a basis for reimagining IR in India. Contesting these claims, the article outlines the ahistorical and politically problematic nature of indigenism. It also argues that the appeal of indigenism reveals a predicament of imaginative capacity that marks the scholarship concerned with reimagining IR in India: despite considerable interest in lessening the dependence on the architecture of IR of the West, there is less clarity about the shape and substance of new scholarly frameworks. The enthusiasm for reimagining IR is not, as yet, matched by very substantive pathways to doing it. This too, inadvertently, encourages indigenism. The article concludes by arguing that closely studying the political modernization of South Asia and its implications for international relations of India and the region can resolve this predicament.

Indigenism in contemporary IR discourses in India: A critique

This text chronicles the 1971 war in South Asia by reconstituting the memories of those on opposing sides of the conflict. The book challenges assumptions about the nature of conflict and exposes the ways in which the 1971 conflict is still playing out in the region. Introduction: Memories in conflict – Call to arms : Bengali nationalist rebellion – Military inaction : power without responsibility – Military action : "Operation Searchlight" in Dhaka – Uncivil war : mobs, mutinies and madness – Village of widows : "securing" the countryside – Hounding of Hindus : the politics of minority persecution – Hit and run : sabotage and retribution – Fratricide : death squads at war's end – Words and numbers : memories and monstrous fables – Appendix 1: Bibliographical note – Appendix 2: List of interviewees.

Islam and Civilisational Renewal

Sarmila Bose , Dead Reckoning : Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War

Its ubiquity notwithstanding, contemporary India's ‘great power' discourse does not appear to reflect the concerns of the Indian multitude. Recognizing this condition and approaching the discourse as a political phenomenon that has real effects, this article makes the following suggestions. First, India's great power discourse comes into existence through a pedagogical project wherein the discourse's core assumptions about India's role and purpose in world affairs appear uncritically emulated from the historical experience of other great powers, primarily the United States. Second, even though the discourse is rooted in a historical experience external to the nation, it would be misleading to term the discourse as a ‘wholly emulated' one. The agential participation of at least some Indian nationals in carrying out the emulation makes it a ‘more emulated and less national' discourse. Third, though it is ‘more emulated and less national,' the project normalizes the discourse by erasing the signs of its emulation; so that it can be passed off as a ‘wholly national' discourse. This allows the discourse to appropriate the entire imaginative space of the Indian nation and, therefore, of India's international relations. Fourth, once aware of these workings of the pedagogical project, we can wonder how a democratic—that is, a ‘more national and less emulated'—idea of India's role and purpose in world affairs could look like.

Jadavpur Journal of International Relations

Emulated or National? Contemporary India's ‘Great Power' Discourse

For the longest part of the two decades since the end of the Cold War, there were mostly Indian perspectives, rather than debates, on Iran and bilateral relations. Domestic debates on Iran began in 2005 and continued until mid-2008, reaching a crescendo during this period and dissipating soon after. The debates, when they took place, were not about influencing the government's Iran policy. Rather they were the necessary oppositions that emerged from specificities of India's domestic politics in which coalition compulsions, parliamentary democracy and ideological differences played their part. {\textcopyright} 2012 Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

Strategic Analysis

Necessary oppositions: Domestic debates on Iran

Emphasis on democracy in Indian and international perspectives on India's foreign policy has grown over the past decade. Claiming that India is a 'successful' example of a non-Western liberal democracy, these perspectives prescribe a role for India in international democratisation efforts. The keener among these suggests that India must participate in Western-style, or Western initiatives of, democracy promotion. This article offers a critique of these prescriptions. Recent theorisations of India's democratic practices argue that India is a predominantly non-liberal democracy. Drawing upon these theorisations, this article outlines the non-liberal features inherent in the practices of Indian democracy. It also outlines the democratic processes that restrain India's foreign policy from acquiring an other-regarding orientation. Contesting the characterisations of India as a liberal democracy, this article questions the basis on which the calls for India to participate in liberal democracy promotion projects are made.

South Asian Survey

India's non-liberal democracy and the discourse of democracy promotion

The article reviews the book "The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War," by Prem Shankar Jha.

India Quarterly

The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalisation, Chaos and War.

{Contested World Orders: Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (Penguin, New Delhi, 2008), pp. 292 Parag Khanna, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global {\ldots}}

This article examines the theoretical salience of territoriality, particularly in South Asia, by comparing the histories of the region's three most contentious boundaries - Durand, McMahon and Radcliffe lines. It argues that four distinct avenues are central to theoretical considerations on territoriality in South Asia: the role of liberalism in colonial construction of state; international and domestic dimensions of geopolitics; disruptions in demographic and cultural contiguities produced by the boundaries; and the nature of sovereignty resulting from the experience of colonialism. Traditional lenses for studying boundaries and territoriality offer limited analytical purchase. The article posits that critical geopolitics and history-intensive approaches allow a better grasp of material and discursive dimensions of territoriality. Such an eclectic consideration is especially suitable for studying territoriality in South Asia given the region's cross-border complexities, both real and symbolic. {\textcopyright} 2008 SAGE Publications.

International Studies

Boundaries and territoriality in South Asia: From historical comparisons to theoretical considerations

Mainstream theories on international relations have largely evaded engagement with the concept of Sovereignty, which is fundamental to the discipline. Critical approaches such as "constructivism" appear to make headway into thinking about Sovereignty, not only in the west but also in south Asia, where theorising is sorely needed. With the approach's engagements with Sovereignty revealing contingent and relativist features as well as sounder ontological foundations of the concept, constructivism is better placed to theorise issues related to domestic and regional politics in south Asia.

Economic and Political Weekly

Theorising state sovereignty in South Asia

Cooperation and Conflict

Book Review: Raia Prokhovnik, Sovereignties: Contemporary Theory and Practice. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 272 pp. ISBN 13: 978 1403 913 234

<p>This chapter examines the relationship between ideological stridency and national security in the context of India. Conceptualizing national security as encompassing both the state and individuals and human groups, the chapter argues that the more ideological India’s political mainstream becomes, the less secure become the state as well as society. The goal of securing India necessitates the inclusion of all its social groups within the political mainstream, an immensely difficult task given the country’s multiple fault lines. Since ideologies exclude some social groups and privilege others, they either widen existing fault lines or create new fissures even as they close pre-existing ones. These fissures produce insecurity. The chapter draws upon elements of modern Indian history to substantiate this argument. It shows how ideological minimalism emerged as one of the central features of the polity. It also discusses the principal ideological forces of postcolonial India and concludes with an analysis of the impact of an ideological domestic and regional policy on India’s internal and external (regional) security in the contemporary period.</p>