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.

Shiv Nadar University

Region is a dynamic concept dependent on particularities of space manifested through varying imageries, and South Asia is no exception. As a regional category, it was borne out of the USA’s need to demarcate the post-War world according to its geopolitical interests, and since then, the elites of all South Asian states have unexceptionally found it difficult to shed off the realist lens vis-à-vis each other. Even though it’s an incredibly diverse region, there is a remarkable consistency in the way the dictates of sovereign territoriality have guided the nation-building projects of all states, and as a result, alternate ways of imagining the region have been severely compromised. South Asia, therefore, remains one of the least integrated regions in the world despite carrying tremendous collaborative potential in various fields. In this context, this chapter explores the possibility of conceptualizing the region through the lens of Critical Theory, which focuses on the emancipatory project of human beings through an anthropological reading of identity and communities. It argues that for such an understanding to gain in prominence, the political culture of the region needs to undergo a fundamental transformation from the territorial, authoritative, and state-centric notion of power and control to a more empathetic, unfettering, and citizen-centric notion. However, it is easier said than done. The material realities of the region centered around the India-Pakistan rivalry, China’s inroads into the region, weakening of civil society institutions, and rise of majoritarianism and religious fundamentalism amidst growing economic distress have ensured that such a transformation is still some distance away. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Šumit Ganguly and Frank O’Donnell.

International Relations and Governance Studies

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Routledge Handbook of the International Relations of South Asia

CRITICAL THEORY APPROACHES TO THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF SOUTH ASIA

This is a chapter published in Eswaran Sridharan (ed.), Eastward Ho: India’s Relations with the Indo-Pacific, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, June 2021. The chapter studies perceptions of various stakeholders in Bangladesh regarding relations with India after the coming to power of a new regime in India. It surveys the dual narratives of conventional and human security challenges and identifies the possible areas of convergences in the bilateral ties between Dhaka and New Delhi. It also audits the federal affects on India;s neighbourhood policy.&nbsp;

India-Bangladesh Relations: Geopolitics or Human Security?

Borders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at the local level. Constituted of processes of identification and networks of interdependences, localized construals of the borderland and subsequently positioned engagements, comes to shape notions of accessibility and restriction as well as perceptions of the “other”. These engagements are not always reflective of statist positions on the border which are often uniform in the conceptualization of its capacity to contain. They subsequently come to reflect the variations of divergent historical and locational realities. There is a need to further extend the analysis of borderlands beyond statist framing as passive recipients of policy as well as recognize the critical positioning of local adaptive processes as antithetical to state demarcations of territoriality and sovereign authority. Based on a survey of three districts in the state of West Bengal, India, this study posits an analysis of the multiple perceptions both within and outside of statist framing of borderland identity and territoriality, which color its inhabitants’ understanding of the border and perceptions surrounding and interactions with the communities that lie beyond it.

World University root node

Fulltext

Borders in Globalization Review

Borders, Citizenship, and the Local: Everyday Life in Three Districts of West Bengal

Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imaginations of India’s identity has been refashioned to legitimize its foreign policy. These three cases point to Nehru’s decision to join the Commonwealth, Vajpayee’s strides for nuclearization and Modi’s approach toward the diaspora. We argue that foreign policy makers in India have either refrained from engaging with ‘public history’ due to their uncritical positioning in structural realism or erected versions of the past that happily rationalize their contemporary practices. The deployment of public histories has taken place to invoke India rightful place in the international order and as instruments in shaping public consensus which advances the interests of the elites in validating their foreign policy choices. This elite-driven exercise is shot through the dominant Western imaginations and cognitive categories although these elites self- consciously took charge of the destiny of a nation that had to be refashioned as ‘post- colonial.’. © 2021 Taylor & Francis.

India Review

Indian foreign policy as public history: globalist, pragmatist and Hindutva imaginations

Humanitarianism and its political derivate, humanitarian intervention, exploded on to the scene a decade back.1The concept of humanitarian intervention was justified as a manifest improvement over the Agenda for Peace approach to global peacekeeping to a more muscular way that sought to protect people from violence across the world and thereby advance the idea of human rights as an ethical imperative or a moral trump over several other competing ideas predicated on claims of juridical sovereignty. This study makes several claims concerning this rather unprecedented dilation of humanitarianism in international politics. First, I show that the idea has evolved from being based on religious piety and charity to crisis mitigation and expedient to one of neoliberal governmentality, a right to save immortal souls more than the perishable bodies. It is at the same time a politics of life and victimhood, which discriminates care as much by ascription and expedient as by the concerns of the well-being and health of the host. Secondly, and as a logical corollary to the first, this requires us to understand humanitarianism as a variant of Foucault’s ideas of biopower and biopolitics, understood as a politics of life, and Derrida’s ideas of hospitality, gift, and forgiveness to understand the challenges of the politics of protection. It explains how the idea of protection is central to humanitarianism and its derivative governmentalism in the form of modern population politics. Thirdly, the paper argues that the modern form of humanitarianism is a product of modern neo-liberal capitalism rather than a form of altruism or love for humanity. Fourthly, I argue that idea of humanitarianism is global in scope, and international humanitarian law as a regulatory basis of global humanitarian governance and the governance practices in the domains of food and health bear a clear testimony to this fact. My central argument is that humanitarian protection is a form of biopolitical governmentality, and, therefore, all contexts of humanitarian protection would show limits and prioritisation of lives. This study argues that the innate diversity of conflicting ethical considerations makes it impossible to arrive at a sanitised version of humanitarianism that can be justified in abstract philosophical terms. Rather, humanitarianism must be understood politically, and considerations of interests, both economic and strategic, are central to the concept.