(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

<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

Afghanistan Post-2014: Power Configurations and Evolving Trajectories

The many lives of Afghanistan: Reassessing disciplinary international relations

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.

World University root node

SSRN Electronic Journal

The Evolving Domestic Drivers of Indian Foreign Policy

Fulltext

Studies in Indian Politics

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

The Mihir Shah Committee report demands a paradigm shift, bringing the ecosystems perspective to the ways water is governed in India. This article argues that these governance reforms, though essential, are not enough to enable the paradigm shift necessary for sustainability and ecological justice. But it may be a great place to begin.

Economic and Political Weekly

Water governance reform a hopeful starting point

The introduction makes three main points, which characterize this volume. (a) It looks at how accumulation under post-colonial capitalism tends to blur various geopolitical boundaries of space, institutions, forms, financial regimes, labour processes, and economic segments on the one hand and creates zones and corridors on the other. In this context, it draws our attention to the peculiar but structurally necessary coexistence of both primitive and virtual modes of accumulation in the postcolony. With increasing inflow of virtual capital in the form of offshore funds, venture business, hedge funds, Internet-based investment and banking, and forward trading, more people are forced to accept precarious work conditions in the unorganized sectors resulting in massive de-peasantization and creation of footloose labour, otherwise known as migrant or transit labour. (b) At the same time, family household becomes the new site of capitalist production and market system, which is different from what is assumed to be a site of non-capitalist production, something that is outside of capital. (c) The introduction also draws attention to what is now called affective labour that is to say labour actualized in the forms of care work and reproductive work. Affective labour leads to the conceptualization of affective value by focusing on the labouring body and subjectivity. Affective value is often mistaken to be essentially a cultural category, and not an economic category, in spite of its vulnerability to exploitation, thus becoming an element in the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. These three aspects taken together reflect on one of the principal features postcolonial capitalism, namely the overwhelming existence of informal conditions of production. These new forms of accumulation result in new discursive and political terrains of struggle. The chapters of the volume reflect from different discursive, analytical, and conceptual perspectives on these new forms of accumulation and unique modes of struggle. © Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) 2017.

History

Accumulation in Post-Colonial Capitalism

Introduction: A post-colonial critique of capital accumulation today

In this paper we consider the exogenous indifference classes model of Barberá and Ehlers (2011) and Sato (2009) and analyze further the relationship between the structure of indifference classes across agents and dictatorship results. The key to our approach is the pairwise partition graph. We provide necessary conditions on these graphs for strategy-proofness and unanimity (or efficiency) to imply dictatorship. These conditions are not sufficient; we also provide separate stronger conditions that are sufficient. A full characterization is obtained in the case of two agents for domains where strategy-proofness and efficiency imply dictatorship. © 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Economics

Social Choice and Welfare

Pairwise partition graphs and strategy-proof social choice in the exogenous indifference class model

Using data generated by extensive simulations of a process where individuals interact globally in a coordination game and iteratively imitate the action of the most successful individual in their local neighbourhood, we study the characteristics of the observation network and distribution of initial choices that facilitate (a speedy) convergence to efficient coordination. Knowing these characteristics is crucial when intervening in social network structures with the intention to nudge society to a socially preferred outcome. The most important factor appears to be the share of individuals that are initially seeded with the socially desirable action. Only for a small window of this share, other factors, including the degree distribution in the network and the segregation of individuals using similar actions, have an influence on the dynamic process of achieving efficient coordination. Moreover, networks possessing the properties of a scale-free network are more likely to yield an efficient outcome compared to small-world networks. © 2015, The Author(s).

Dynamic Games and Applications

Network Characteristics Enabling Efficient Coordination: A Simulation Study

The article seeks to redraw some key discussions on death in Banaras by focusing on the subject matter of the ‘dead’ rather than that of death. Pitched in the shadow of select earlier works on anthropology of death pertaining to Banaras, the general probing centres on the query whether the three realms of dying, death and dead can be delinked and thus seen in a certain relative autonomy from each other. Further, how do the anthropological accounts of death get refracted when seen from the vantage point of the dead? Based on ethnographic fieldwork at intertwined field sites of the home and the hospital, manual and electric cremation ghat and the shaivite aghorashram (hermitage) in relation to the river Ganga, the descriptions involve discussion over declaration of death versus discovery of the dead, distinction between touching and handling of the dead and latent implications of the varied names of the dead. The core concern of the article is to explore the nature of the social vis-à-vis the dead. I show how, unlike the anthropology of death that very often reiterates communitarian restoration (pravah), an anthropology of the dead may haltingly resist such reading and seek a continual searching of the indefinite social (parvah). © 2016, © 2016 SAGE Publications.

Sociology

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Many lives of the dead in Banaras: Towards an anthropology of the indefinite social

<p>Book Review: Roma Chatterji, Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Traditions in India. 2012.</p>

Society and Culture in South Asia

We develop a nonsmooth approach to envelope theorems applicable to a broad class of parameterized constrained nonlinear optimization problems that arise typically in economic applications with nonconvexities and/or nonsmooth objectives. Our methods emphasize the role of the Strict Mangasarian-Fromovitz Constraint Qualification (SMFCQ), and include envelope theorems for both the convex and nonconvex case, allow for noninterior solutions as well as equality and inequality constraints. We give new sufficient conditions for the value function to be directionally differentiable, as well as continuously differentiable. We apply our results to stochastic growth models with Markov shocks and constrained lattice programming problems. © 2015 Elsevier B.V.