Is India a Responsible Great Power?

Abstract

To what extent does rising responsibility accompany rising power in international relations? This article focuses on India to address the question: is a responsible great power in the making? Following a brief theoretical discussion on the notion of responsibility and its relationship to rising power, the article offers an empirical overview of India's achievements thus far, and also the international and domestic challenges that it faces today. It argues that despite the attempts by observers to thrust greatness upon India, the country is yet to achieve greatness. The article further illustrates that India's record of assuming global responsibility has been lacklustre at best. A central argument of the article is that India's reluctance to share the burden of providing global public goods is inseparably bound with the nature of its rise to power.     

China's Relations with India's Neighbours: From Threat Avoidance to Alternative Development Opportunity

Abstract

China, once seen as a threat by the states of South Asia, is now viewed correctly as an alternative development opportunity. The unprecedented success of the Chinese development model places it as an obvious alternative to that offered by India—or indeed by the Western model of development—but what implications does this have for the middle and small powers that surround India, and indeed for India and the Western developed world? The fundamental rationale for China's relations with South Asia has changed radically, but the Sino-centric nature of Chinese foreign policy remains. Uniquely, for India's neighbours, but also for the global political economy as a whole, Chinese economic power raises political issues of human security, economic interdependence, and the relationship between physical infrastructure and the benefits of global public goods. The Chinese necessity to tranship through South Asia is identified as a complex new reality for the great power.     

Review

Abstract

What structured the fundamental nature of Indian security for the first 50 years of the country's independence? This article draws out four normative parameters that have been tempered and normalised during this period through India's international interaction along with her internal political developments. Using notions of ‘security identity’, the article unpacks these normative parameters in order to investigate holistically the interaction between both domestic and foreign influences in India's international relations. As such, the article finds a relative consistency to how security has been conceived of in India—displaying sustained threats to its territorial integrity, a continued democratic tradition, ongoing fears of communal violence plus an engrained desire for a greater global role. In turn, it has been the interface between internal and external factors that has structured, and continues to structure, Indian security.     

All that Glitters is not Gold: India's rise to power

Recent years have seen a plethora of writings—by scholars, journalists and policy makers alike—on India's rise to power. This paper argues that this much-vaunted rise needs to be viewed with caution. It examines the case for India's rise, and operationalises its growing influence by applying and further developing the concept of ‘veto-player’. It highlights ways in which India has indeed acquired the status of a de facto veto-player in international relations. But the paper then presents three sets of reasons for caution. First, even though India's rise to power might appear dramatic and sudden, it is a product of a long and incremental process. This has policy implications: not all the policies of the preceding era should be carelessly abandoned by India or by other developing countries in similar circumstances. Second, there are still significant hurdles—many of which are domestic—that it must overcome if it is to fully realise its potential and acquire the status of a great power. Third, India may have acquired effective veto-player status in certain crucial negotiations, but this does not automatically translate into an ability to achieve preferred outcomes. Having examined the hurdles that India faces on its pathway to power, the paper goes on to suggest strategies that could be adopted to convert veto-player status into positive influence.     

Challenging Global Neoliberalism? The global political economy of China's capital controls

This article engages with critical ipe scholars who have examined the rise of China and its impact on the neoliberal world order by analysing whether China poses a challenge to the neoliberal norm of free movement of capital. We argue that China's capital control regime is marked by a contradiction between its domestic social relations of production and its global geo-economic ambitions. On one hand, the key raison d'être of China's capital controls is to protect and consolidate an investment-led accumulation regime that redistributes income and wealth from Chinese workers to its state-owned enterprise sector. Dismantling these controls would result in changing social relations of production that would not necessarily benefit Chinese industrial and financial capital. On the other hand, China's accumulation regime has found itself increasingly constrained by the dynamics of US monetary hegemony, making the contestation of US structural monetary power a key global geo-economic ambition of China's ruling elites. In this regard, China would have to challenge the dominance of the US dollar by promoting the international role of the renminbi and developing liquid financial markets. Since it would have to abolish its capital controls in order to achieve this, there is a plain contradiction between its domestic and global objectives. A good understanding of this contradiction is necessary in order to be able to assess whether China will be capable of challenging the neoliberal world order in general and the norm of free movement of capital in particular.     

Development perspectives from the Antipodes: an introduction

Abstract

Is there a distinctive Antipodean approach to development? In this introduction I take up Raewyn Connell's challenge to explore the possibilities for knowledge production that reflects Australia's and New Zealand's geographical situation of rich peripheral countries and their history of settler colonisation. While Antipodeans' contributions to development theory have been limited, their work is characterised by close connections between theory and practice. The Antipodes' positioning as global North in the geographical South has stimulated a search for alternative approaches to development knowledge. This is variously pursued through collaborative research relationships with indigenous communities, close engagement with non-Western cultural frameworks, and a focus on marginal spaces and positions. As the centre of global economic power shifts to the South, existing development relationships and established ways of doing development are increasingly challenged by newly constituted subject positions and coalitions.     

A view from congress

Abstract

Since 1947, India's defense posture and policies have evolved in response to its external and domestic circumstances. Examined in this article are the impact of the international system on India's defense behavior; the impact of regional military developments and crises on Indian behavior; the relationship between leadership style and leadership interest, especially in the 1980s, and Indian defense posture; the influence of internal bureaucratic politics, triggered by external developments, and its impact on defense policy and posture, and the relationship between diplomacy and force in the pursuit of Indian security. The first part of the article outlines the Indian strategic concept, the distribution of military capabilities, and the external and internal setting concerning each period. The second part is analytical, tracing the pattern of development of Indian security systems as it stands today. The final section deals with the irreversible broadening of the Indian defense debates, i. e., a shift away from the small and closed decision‐making of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years to a broad‐based articulation of defense concerns and resources.     

Strategic Culture,Representations of Nuclear (In)Securities,and the Government of India: A Critical Constructivist Perspective

In this article, I use Alastair Johnston's concept of strategic culture re-visited through a critical constructivist perspective to analyze the representations of India's strategic culture and nuclear policy choices. In doing so, I explore how the representational practices of (and the mutually-constitutive relation between) India's nationalist identity/Self and its strategic environment, facilitated via its political leaders’ ideological lenses, have produced shifting representations of India's strategic environment to justify the nation's nuclear policy choices. In exploring this representational linkage between India's strategic environment and its nuclear (in)securities, I am cognizant that anarchy is a challenge facing India's task of nation-making and thus realism serves as a partially valid explanation for understanding the logic proliferation. Yet, my study demonstrates how culturally guided interpretations of what constitutes the Indian Self have divergently re-interpreted India's strategic environment and (in)securities to define the nation's nuclear policy choices.     

Gender,Palestinian Women,and Terrorism: Women's Liberation or Oppression?

Contrary to claim, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are not overwhelmingly secular in their practices. While their successes as a liberation movement have been built on organizational skills and techno-military prowess, they mobilize both the Hindu majority and a significant Christian minority within the Sri Lankan Tamil population via modalities that are deeply rooted in the lifestyles and religious practices of Tamils in India and Lanka. To grasp these capacities a reading of the deep history of Tamil civilization writ-large as well as the anthropological literature on religious cross-fertilization in Sri Lanka is essential. The weight attached to propitiatory rituals in Tamil culture inform the LTTE's burial of the dead and the building up of a sacred topography centered on their fallen (the mavirar). Just as heroic humans were deified in southern India's past, regenerative divine power is conceivably invested in today's Tiger mavirar. These facets of Tamil Tiger practice suggests that “enchantment” can nestle amidst secularized rationality in the structures of a modern political movement.     

Middle Range Powers in Global Governance

Abstract

This article compares and evaluates the contributions of middle range powers to global governance initiatives. Examining participation in terms of personnel, financial and ideational contributions, we test several hypotheses derived from neorealism, critical theory, liberalism, constructivism, and post-internationalism against six cases: Canada, Japan, China, Russia, India and Brazil. We find that material power has a negative impact on contributions, while a country’s leadership’s attitude towards the international order, the length of its membership in major international organisations and the strength of its civil society all seem to have positive effects on its participation in global governance. Trade dependence, however, does not seem to exhibit the expected impact. The article indicates that multiple theoretical approaches may prove useful for evaluating the behaviour of middle range powers, and that further research should be conducted on the relative importance of each of the factors mentioned above in explaining middle range power contributions to global governance.     

The Rise of India: Overcoming Caste Society and Permit-License-Quota Raj,Implementing Some Economic Freedom

Two or three centuries ago most of mankind was still very poor. When the West outgrew mass poverty, India was a British colony and suffered from stagnation. When East Asian economies exploited the advantages of backwardness and benefited from export-led growth, India remained inward-looking and poor. The ‘Hindu rate of growth’ preserved mass poverty. Since the reforms of the early 1990s India has exploited the advantages of backwardness and some global markets. In this article, the roots of India's failure to grow rapidly before the end of the twentieth century are analyzed. Stagnation is blamed on restrictions of economic freedom, whereas growth is explained by the expansion of economic freedom. Before the mid-twentieth century, the caste system and the legacy of sultanism curtailed economic freedom and contributed to economic stagnation. Thereafter, democratic socialism distorted incentives and generated ‘permit-license-quota raj’ or a rent-seeking society. When some obstacles to growth were dismantled, vigorous growth followed. Although expanding economic freedom remains limited. India's growth potential is not yet fully exploited. Indian infrastructure and human capital formation remain inadequate, regulations intrusive, and the budget in deficit. The rule of law looks better on paper than from the ground. Compared to China Indian public policy still has a lot of room for improvements. ‘Maoists’ or Naxalites threaten political stability and economic freedom. Geopolitics may explain India's late, slow and incomplete reforms. The rise of Asia, in particular of China and India, generates geopolitical challenges of its own. Conceivably, the global expansion of economic freedom permits not only the rise of Asia, but the peaceful management of the coming power transition between Asia and the West.     

Africa's prospects and South Africa's leadership potential in the emerging markets century

This article examines Africa's role in an evolving international system where powerful emerging markets, such as bric, together with established powers are shaping economic trajectories. The specific focus is on South Africa as an aspiring leader on the African continent, and on its potential for becoming an emerging market shaping the global order together with bric and the West. It is unclear whether a changing global economy in which the postcolonial world plays a greater role will result in improved developmental prospects for Africans as African countries gradually reorient themselves from the West to the South, or whether relations with emerging markets will resemble neo-colonial ties with the West. South Africa's structural weakness, stemming from serious domestic problems of a social, political and economic nature, threatens to undermine its standing in Africa and its emerging market status.     

The Violence of Aid? Giving,power and active subjects in One World Conservatism

Abstract

Using ?i?ek's theorisation of power, we analyse the UK Conservative Party's Green Paper on international development, ‘One World Conservatism’ (OWC). We argue that by placing the West's giving of development aid as something beyond politics, on the moral high-ground of self-evident certainty, it acts to deflect attention from critical engagement with the nature of globalisation, power and aid itself, hiding both economic and epistemological violences behind the apparently benevolent act of giving. An analysis of the nature of the green paper demonstrates the ways in which it draws in UK citizens as active subjects complicit with this vision of the world.     

The Identity of Turkey: Muslim and secular

Abstract

This article analyses the rise of political Islam in Turkey in the context of the akp's tenure in power with reference to complex social, economic, historical and ideational factors. It aims to answer one of the key questions, which has wider implications for the West and Islamic world: ‘having experienced the bad and good of the West in secularism and democracy’, as claimed by Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, is Turkey in transition from a secular to an Islamic state? The article first questions Turkey's ‘bridge’ or ‘torn-country’ status and then explains the akp's ambivalent policies towards religious and identity issues in relation to the increased public visibility of Islam and a ‘performative reflexivity’ of ‘Muslim-selves’. It concludes that the real issue at stake is not the assumed clash of secular and Muslim identities but the complex of interdependence between Islam, secularism and democratisation in Turkey.     

Settling the Sino–Russian Border Issue: Land in Exchange for a Strategic Partnership?

Abstract

China has been committed to resolving its border disputes with Russia since the late 1980s and expedited this move in the wake of the Cold War in the hope of removing what has been referred to as the ‘biggest obstacle’ to the establishment of a strategic partnership with Russia. In so doing, China pursued three interconnected objectives. The first relates to China’s strategic and security environment that, in the Chinese perspective, has worsened since the United States has unilaterally engaged in a policy of China-containment. The second objective is to maintain China’s economic growth through a partnership with its resource-abundant neighbour. Chinese political leadership and academics have considered economic modernisation as their ‘paramount’ task since Deng Xiaoping launched market reform in the late 1970s. The third objective is to fulfil China’s dream of restoring its past glory by rising in the global power hierarchy and reshaping the current world order more to its liking.     

The oppression/emancipation nexus in ongoing power struggles: Village—Power dynamics in Western Nepal 1

Abstract

How can we gain a more nuanced understanding of power struggles than is assumed under the ‘power as domination’ perception that attributes power to dominant actors who exercise control over others, and thus dichotomises domination and emancipation? This article addresses this question by exploring the power dynamics underlying ‘participatory’ public works in a village in western Nepal. Drawing on an alternative analytical framework that brings together Giddens' ‘structuration’ perspective and the Foucauldian notion of power, the case study illustrates that dominance and resistance are interwoven in day-to-day social interactions, and that the existing social order is continually being readjusted. The article concludes by discussing this study's implications for proponents of empowerment, namely the need to ascertain the emancipatory potentials that are immanent in daily power contestation, and then to develop strategies that compensate for the limitations of everyday struggles.     

Non-market Returns to Traditional Human Capital: Nutritional Status and Traditional Knowledge in a Native Amazonian Society

Soviet Agricultural and Peasant Affairs. Edited by Roy D. Laird London: Constable &; Co. 1964, xiv, 335 pp. 60/‐

India's Export Trends and the Prospects for Self‐Sustained Growth. By Manmohan Singh. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, pp. xiv + 370. 45s.

The Political Economy of Mexico. By W. P. Glade and C. W. Anderson. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1963. Pp. xii, 242, $5.     

Locating black feminist resistance through diaspora and post-diaspora in Edwidge Danticat’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short stories

ABSTRACT

Migrating to the US is transformative in the short stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! and Chimamanda Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck. The currents of Blackness, gender and class alter their characters' experiences of the world, shaped by the global flows of migration taking place under neoliberal capitalism. This essay explores the nuanced and conflicting ways diaspora and post-diaspora spaces can facilitate Black feminist resistance in Danticat's ‘Caroline's Wedding' and Adichie's ‘Imitation'. I offer a Black feminist analysis, paying attention to the literary body as the site where tensions are dramatised. My reading of Danticat's and Adichie’s short stories leads to a progressive reconsideration of diaspora.     

The coloniality of abridgment: afterlives of mass violence in Cambodia and the US

Abstract

This article examines processes of knowledge production around mass violence in 1970s Cambodia including media reportage and coeval scholarly debate, developing a conceptualisation of colonial abridgment. It assesses operations by which Cambodia as a country is violently essentialised, the occurrence of mass violence taking on metonymic grandeur that works to deny imperial legacies, entomb modern Cambodia in a hermetically sealed past and thereby maintain global order within existing racial-colonial logics.     

Challenging the European Union: the rising powers and the USA in the Doha Round

In this article, the challenges posed to the European Union's (EU) role in trade policy and its implications for development policy during the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Agenda, also known as the Doha round, are highlighted. The authors argue that transformed power relations have created a situation characterized by role uncertainty, for the emerging powers but also for the EU. Priorities among multiple possible roles – in the existing trade regime, in relation to the global South and in the ongoing negotiations – become subject to redefinition. For the EU, heavily wedded to a multilateralist and reformist mission because of its own history, this process is particularly difficult. The EU's traditional role conceptions as a leader and a benign partner to developing countries have been challenged and partly replaced by a more realist approach.