Papers

Gulliver’s Neighborly Fetters: How South Asian Regional Politics Reinforce India’s Strategic Orientation

Increasingly, India is more influential over the horizon – in the rest of Asia, in the Middle East, and globally – than it is within its own neighborhood. This paper explores how relations with her neighbors affect distinct, durable patterns in how India conducts foreign policy over the medium and long run. “Grand Strategy” is the term often used to refer to the long-term goals), explicitly identified by apex leaders of a country (or alliance of countries), and pursued through active coordination of military, economic and diplomatic resources. India does not have a grand strategy; it has a strategic orientation. As I explain below, the distinct, durable pattern – its strategic orientation – observed in India’s conduct of foreign policy over the medium and long run can and should be analyzed as if it were India’s grand strategy. A premise of this argument is that India pursues a strategy of “equipoise” by which it does not bandwagon or balance (to use IR theory terms). This is not to say that a fairly well-defined strategic orientation can’t already be identified. Such a strategic orientation will become ever clearer in the coming years, even while India continues to puzzle IR scholars and practitioners by its absence of an explicitly state, or doctrinally-driven grand strategy.

Breaking Away?: With IT, India Confronts the Challenges of its First Leading Global Sector

What Ripens Rivalry? Contested Sovereignty and Insecurity in Asia

In 1994 Aaron Friedberg wondered whether Asia was "Ripe for Rivalry." He argued that Asia lacked the institutionalization within and among states that had diminished the likelihood of conflict in post- Cold War Europe. Recent Asian prosperity had funded arms procurement and a competition for prestige in the region that could, Friedberg believed, spark a classic security dilemma. He suggested that if tensions rose, the lack of European-style institutions could be lethal. This paper first considers the recent Asian financial crisis and the regional economic downturn as a quasi-test of Friedberg's expectations.

Measures of institutionalization, and formal institutions are problematic, both for analyzing or mitigating regional insecurity among the "network" cultures of Asia. I argue that by focusing instead on the problem of contested sovereignty, we can better understand (and more effectively seek to resolve) insecurity in Asia. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a unified "bi-level" frame for analyzing actual and potential conflict both within (where most violence occurs) and among Asian states. The paper draws its conclusions from six brief cases studies of the most violent or menacing events in recent years including: cross-straits relations (PRC-Taiwan), the Kashmir conflict (Indo-Pakistan), the Jaffna Peninsula conflict (Sri Lankan-Tamil), rivalry and secession in East Timor, and rivalry in the South China Sea.

Securing the Periphery: Tibet, Kashmir, and the Construction of Chinese and Indian State Ideologies of Incorporation

China and India are inheritors of expansive, heavily populated imperial legacies. They have faced the challenge of maintaining security and stability while engaged in highly demanding state-building and development projects. This paper examines the political challenge of territorial consolidation, and specifically these two states' effort to incorporate nationally distinct peripheral areas, such as Tibet and Kashmir. In the early years both states conferred special "autonomous" status on both areas, but quickly violated the spirit, and often the letter of those de jure arrangements.

Why have these arrangements failed? What conditions render the incorporation of Kashmir and Tibet "problematic"?

Blending sociological institutionalist and Gramsican approaches, this paper will analyze state borders as institutions. The shape of states is treated as a social construction in which territorial incorporation and the constitution of borders are understood as processes of institutionalization. The degree to which a peripheral territory may be embedded in a metropolitan state, and normalized as such, varies across time in each case and across the two cases. This variation can be explained with reference to the ideological power of the incorporating myth, the relative success of ideological resistance to that myth, and outright conflict in the political and military arenas.

This probe of the Kashmiri and Tibetan cases suggests that, for multi-national states like India and China, political integration as a basic means of pursuing security is difficult to achieve. Incorporation, in the narrow sense of 'national' integration, and 'the creation of a nation-state from above' is highly problematic. There is a fundamental paradox between coercion and consent inherent in any such supra-national incorporation project.