Over the last decade or so, the International Relations (IR) literature has increasingly turned its attention to the crucial role of status and status-seeking in influencing state interactions and the shape of international order. Recent real-world politics has only underscored the importance of thinking about status given that, on the one hand, the international order…
Tag: India
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-40 on Sarkar, Plougshares and Swords
India’s nuclear program has been a source of fascination for historians and political scientists for decades. Perhaps more than any other case, there are deep disagreements over what motivated India’s nuclear pursuits. For some, India’s nuclear program was driven in large part by domestic political concerns.[1] Others emphasize Indian leaders’ beliefs about national identity or…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-38 on Lerner, From the Ashes of History
I am honored to provide this brief introduction to the roundtable discussion on Adam Lerner’s award-winning book.[1] As Lerner notes in his response, I endorsed it with a highly favourable blurb. I wrote: Through meticulous, powerful, and gripping case studies and a careful but also forceful set of theoretical assertions, Lerner’s ambitious book brilliantly demonstrates…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 74 on Sagar, ed. To Raise a Fallen People
Scholarship on Indian international political thought has, until recently, been defined by a relative degree of paucity and narrowness. The reasons for this are familiar. The Eurocentrism of the history of international political thought and its disciplinary ally, International Relations, bears some share of the blame, even if this is changing. Another limiting factor is…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable Review 14-18 on Lawrence, The End of Ambition
Mark Lawrence is a prominent, prize-winning historian of US foreign relations. The End of Ambition shows why. The book offers a brilliant interpretation of US policy towards the Third World in the 1960s. It shows how the decade’s early ambition gave way to cynicism and accommodations with reactionary regimes. Lawrence organizes his argument around five…
Policy Series 2021-57: Riding the Rollercoaster: India and the Trump Years
On November 9, 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called President-elect Donald Trump to congratulate him on his electoral victory. Perhaps fittingly, news of this exchange first appeared on Twitter.[1] Subsequently, reports emerged in late November that then Indian foreign secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was in the United States to meet with members of Trump’s transition…
Article Review 139 on “Substate Organizations as Foreign Policy Agents: New Evidence and Theory from India, Israel, and France.”
Nicolas Blarel and Jayita Sarkar have written a valuable article on the intra-state politics of foreign policy. An extensive line of research in recent years has examined how domestic political competition (i.e. elections and parties), public opinion, and leaders can shape foreign policy. Yet bureaucracies within the state – what Blarel and Sarkar refer to…
Article Review 127 on “India’s Counterforce Temptations: Strategic Dilemmas, Doctrine, and Capabilities.”
On 14 February 2019 a suicide bomber struck an Indian Central Military Reserve Force (CRPF) convoy in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir, killing about 40 Indian paramilitary personnel and injuring numerous others. Responsibility for the attack was swiftly claimed by the Pakistan based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, and confirmed by Indian authorities, immediately dragging the subcontinent—yet…
Policy Forum 23 on the 2019 Kashmir Crisis
On 5 August 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government announced the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir autonomy within India, including a separate constitution, a state flag and control over internal administrative matters. At the same time, Modi’s government also abolished Article 35A, which…
Article Review 111 on “Democratic Accountability and Foreign Security Policy: Theory and Evidence from India.”
“We need to rethink how democratic politics relate to foreign policy behavior” (444). This is how Vipin Narang and Paul Staniland describe the objective of their article, one that they achieve with theoretical sophistication and a deft grasp of the literature on the democratic difference in security studies.