International Relations and Governance Studies

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

The Communist Party of China (CPC) completed 100 years of its existence in July 2021, with the last 70 plus years spent as the ruling party in China. The centenary occasioned a fresh consideration by the CPC of the challenges to its identity, legitimacy and power. Using select speeches and commentaries produced by the CPC in the context of the centenary, this article analyses how the Party deploys discourses on its history to articulate its concerns and promote its interests today. It also looks at how these interpretations of the Party’s history and role in China translate into a growing sense of exceptionalism in the Party-state. The article argues that despite frequent calls to ‘seek truth from facts’, an overriding desire to retain power is once again pushing the CPC down the path towards dogmatism. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

World University root node

China Report

Towards Exceptionalism: The Communist Party of China and its Uses of History

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.

Routledge Handbook of the International Relations of South Asia

CRITICAL THEORY APPROACHES TO THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF SOUTH ASIA

The Communist Party of China’s transition from a revolutionary party to a ruling party has been accompanied by challenges to its legitimacy owing to issues of corruption and poor governance. As a result, the Party’s leadership has time and again laid stress on discipline and unity on internal governance, in other words, as a way of overcoming its shortcomings. This article looks at two approaches towards internal governance under current General Secretary Xi Jinping. The first, it argues, is a stress on the fervour and ideals of a past revolutionary era as the Party tries to reinforce its legitimacy to rule. The second is a strategy of greater control over the work of the state. Essentially, the Party is integrating the state ever closely with itself as a way of validating the effectiveness of its internal governance. © 2022 SAGE Publications.

‘Carrying Forward the Great Founding Spirit’: Governance in the Communist Party of China Today

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.

Fulltext

Borders in Globalization Review

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

‘Imperialism, International Law and War: Enduring Legacies and Curious Entanglements’ in Lothar Brock and Hendrik Smith ed. The Justification of War and International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp.45-64

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

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

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

The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review (Dasgupta 2021), henceforth the Review, tells us that we are embedded in Nature and our economies are bounded within Nature. It helps us estimate the value of natural capital and include it in estimations of economic output. The Review’s key messages concern (i) keeping our demands well within Nature’s supply, (ii) moving away from gross domestic product (GDP) towards inclusive wealth as a measure of economic success, and (iii) acknowledging the institutional failure in addressing global environmental problems and resolving them through institutional reforms in the financial and education systems. However, this commentary suggests that the Review is about conserving economics for biodiversity. It offers little opportunity for transformative change in our thinking and acting, to change our relationship with Nature so that we can conserve its diversity and dynamism. This commentary suggests possible ways forward, drawing upon lessons on non-linear behaviour, emergent properties, and complexity in Nature. These include looking to niche communities that live within the limits set by Nature, learning from various environmental social sciences on how to maintain and promote the aggregate stocks and funds of Nature; and finding ways to include economic activity and output in value frameworks of sustainability, justice, and diversity. © Raina 2021.

Ecology, Economy and Society

Conserving economics for biodiversity: Reflections on “the dasgupta review”

The environment is often invoked in the context of growing municipal waste, a result of rapid growth and burgeoning consumption in urban India, in a manner that would appear to be class and caste neutral, as well as accommodating of the interests of labor. In actuality, waste policy and practice have been contoured in distinctly opposite directions to that dictated by a genuine concern for the environment. The article draws on primary qualitative research in a medium hill town, primarily key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and official documents, to substantiate its arguments. Key findings suggest that the benign platform of the environment disguises ever greater informalization of the formal, in newer and structurally more damaging ways, to both labor and the environment. Indeed, as hypothesized by Roy (2009), the waste sphere shows the idiom of India’s urbanization and planning itself to be one of informality, characterized by deregulation, ambivalence, opacity, and exemption. © 2021 SAGE Publications.