Competing Visions of India in World Politics


Book Description

This edited collection presents an alternative set of reflections on India's contemporary global role by exploring a range of influential non-Western state perspectives. Through multiple case studies, the contributors gauge the success of India's efforts to be seen as an alternative global power in the twenty-first century.




Great Powers and Strategic Stability in the 21st Century


Book Description

This book addresses the issue of grand strategic stability in the 21st century, and examines the role of the key centres of global power - US, EU, Russia, China and India - in managing contemporary strategic threats. This edited volume examines the cooperative and conflictual capacity of Great Powers to manage increasingly interconnected strategic threats (not least, terrorism and political extremism, WMD proliferation, fragile states, regional crises and conflict and the energy-climate nexus) in the 21st century. The contributors question whether global order will increasingly be characterised by a predictable interdependent one-world system, as strategic threats create interest-based incentives and functional benefits. The work moves on to argue that the operational concept of world order is a Concert of Great Powers directing a new institutional order, norms and regimes whose combination is strategic-threat specific, regionally sensitive, loosely organised, and inclusive of major states (not least Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia). Leadership can be singular, collective or coalition-based and this will characterise the nature of strategic stability and world order in the 21st century. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, grand strategy, foreign policy and IR. Graeme P. Herd is Co-Director of the International Training Course in Security Policy at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). He is co-author of several books and co-editor of The Ideological War on Terror: World Wide Strategies for Counter Terrorism (2007), Soft Security Threats and European Security (2005), Security Dynamics of the former Soviet Bloc (2003) and Russia and the Regions: Strength through Weakness (2003).




India in South Asia


Book Description

South Asia is one of the most volatile regions of the world, and India’s complex democratic political system impinges on its relations with its South Asian neighbours. Focusing on this relationship, this book explores the extent to which domestic politics affect a country’s foreign policy. The book argues that particular continuities and disjunctures in Indian foreign policy are linked to the way in which Indian elites articulated Indian identity in response to the needs of domestic politics. The manner in which these state elites conceive India’s region and regional role depends on their need to stay in tune with domestic identity politics. Such exigencies have important implications for Indian foreign policy in South Asia. Analysing India’s foreign policy through the lens of competing domestic visions at three different historical eras in India’s independent history, the book provides a framework for studying India’s developing nationhood on the basis of these idea(s) of ‘India’. This approach allows for a deeper and a more nuanced interpretation of the motives for India’s foreign policy choices than the traditional realist or neo-liberal framework, and provides a useful contribution to South Asian Studies, Politics and International Studies.




Globalizing India


Book Description

This book explores India's rise on the global economic stage from the perspective of both international and domestic interests and activities. Sinha argues that the impact of globalization on India since 1990 needs to be understood not just in terms of national policy, but also in terms of changing trade capacities and private sector reform.




Competing Visions of India in World Politics


Book Description

This edited collection presents an alternative set of reflections on India's contemporary global role by exploring a range of influential non-Western state perspectives. Through multiple case studies, the contributors gauge the success of India's efforts to be seen as an alternative global power in the twenty-first century.




Indian Foreign Policy


Book Description




Utopias in Conflict


Book Description

This compact, incisive study by a senior scholar explores two sources of violent conflict in India: religion and nationalism. Showing how the political aspects of religion and the ideological character of nationalism have led inexorably to struggle, Ainslie T. Embree argues that the tension between competing visions of the just society has determined the social and political life of India. In India, as elsewhere in the world at the end of the twentieth century, religions legitimized violence as people struggled for what they regarded as their legitimate claims upon the future. As examples of the tension between religious and nationalist visions of the good society, Embree examines two explosive cases—one involving Muslim-Hindu communal encounters, the other, the separatist movement of the Sikhs. Thought-provoking and searching, Utopias in Conflict should interest anyone concerned about fundamentalism, the problems of national integration, and politics and religion in the Third World. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.




Competing Visions of World Order


Book Description

Bringing together scholars from around the world, this first book in the Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series raises the question of how we can get away from the contemporary language of globalization, so as to identify meaningful, global ways of defining historical events and processes in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.




India's Foreign Policy


Book Description

This volume brings together cutting-edge research in the field of Indian foreign policy both at the theoretical and empirical level.




Cosmopolitan Elites


Book Description

Cosmopolitan Elites narrates the birth, everyday life, and fracturing of a Western-dominated global order from its margins. It offers a critical sociological examination of the elite Indian Foreign Service and its members, many of whom were present at the founding of this order. Kira Huju explores how these diplomats set out to remake the service in the name of a radically anti-colonial global subaltern, but often ended up seeking status within its hierarchies through social mimicry of its most powerful actors. This is a book about the struggles of belonging: it revisits what it takes to be a recognized member of international society and asks what the experience of historically marginalized actors inside the diplomatic club can tell us about the evident woes of global order today. In interrogating how Indian diplomats learned to live under a Westernized world order, it also offers a sociologically grounded reading of what might happen in spaces like India as the world transitions past Western domination. An awkward balancing act animates the order-making of India's cosmopolitan diplomats: despite a genuine desire to strive toward a postcolonial world founded on diversity, difference, and the symbolic representation of a global subaltern, there is a strong sense of a lingering caricature-like notion of a white, European-dominated homogenous club, to which Indian diplomats feel a deep-rooted and colonially embedded desire to belong. Cosmopolitanism operates inside this balancing act not as an international ethic upholding an equal, tolerant, or liberal global order, but rather as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance, diplomatic accommodation, and social assimilation into Western mores. Based on 85 interviews with Indian diplomats, politicians, and foreign policy experts, as well as archival work in New Delhi, the book asks what the experience of historically marginalized actors inside the diplomatic club tells us about the social hierarchies of race, class, religion, gender, and caste under global order.