This special issue of The Book Review covers immense ground in contemporary geopolitical discourse. Though fifty-one wide-ranging reviews may at first appear too diverse to permit an identification of themes, distinct clusters of ideas emerge. Strategic fluctuations, domestic politics, external engagements, and democracy, identity, and culture are cross-cutting themes that demand an intersectional lens of analysis. This provides the logic and structure for the issue’s intellectual foundations. The reviews, diverse as they may be, are unified in their insistence on the inseparability of high politics from everyday lives. Ultimately, it is precisely in its contemplation of social and political uncertainty that the issue offers its most fundamental motif: the pursuit of greater stability.
A considerable portion interrogates questions of geopolitical uncertainty. Indeed, the rules-based liberal international order—never quite equal to begin with, having been constructed by the few for the many—has been hollowed out primarily by those that created it. This has led to a collapse of order that was once reliable, if only because of its familiarity, and contributed to the emergence of persistently shifting power equations. States find themselves having to continuously negotiate asymmetries, and their place in the world. Shivshankar Menon’s Asian Geopolitics Today analyses the present as an ‘orderless’ moment where outcomes define strategy. Amitav Acharya’s The Once and Future World Order historicizes world order beyond Western dominance and proposes a plural ‘multiplex’ future.
Works on major, middle, and small power behaviour—The Case for American Power, The Fractured Age, The Art of War and Peace, and India-China Relations—examine how military force, economic rivalry, and regional conflict are additionally reshaping global politics. Subsumed within this focus is the failure of strategic imagination, particularly with regard to Europe’s geopolitical reckoning through the Russia-Ukraine war and the increasing, though belated, recognition of the unreliability of the transatlantic alliance. Das Versagen and Wenn Russland Gewinnt investigate how a tendency to misread Russian intentions and avoiding hard power thinking have undermined European security. These books highlight how denying political realities produces long-term strategic vulnerability.
Several essays assess India’s diplomatic history and strategic choices. The Nehru Years, India in the Interim, and Indian Parliament: Shaping Foreign Policy review the origins of Indian foreign policy, especially nonalignment and parliamentary oversight. India-Afghanistan Bilateral Relationship presents a detailed account of India’s development-centred engagement with a neighbour. In Praise of Coalition Politics and The Fight for the Republic link domestic political pluralism with external credibility. These essays engage with books that situate India’s international role within historical continuity, institutional behaviour, and the critical relevance of India’s regional relationships in determining its broader global role. They provide important takeaways for contemporary foreign policy practice at a time of significant geopolitical polarization.
Another cluster of reviews is centred on Indian democracy, constitutionalism, and domestic political power. They connect to the broader theme of geopolitics as the forces that gives meaning and purpose to India’s external relations. For a Just Republic, Legalizing the Revolution, Deconstructing India’s Democracy, and 50 Years of the Indian Emergency examine constitutional values, democratic backsliding, and institutional resilience. The bottom line is that ‘democracy’ is never settled. It is an ongoing process of negotiation shaped by law, movements and memory.
Questions of social justice that coalesce around caste, gender, class and marginalization are another thematic focus. Counting Caste, Elusive Democracy, Democracy and Impunity, A Woman’s Job, “New” Women, Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us and Boats in a Storm explore how power operates through social hierarchies and everyday governance. Finally, several essays further blur the boundary between disciplines, high politics, and daily life. Books such as Immoral Traffic, On the Margins of Protection, Everyday Islamic Law, The Music of Stones, Reading Across Borders, and Resisting Military Rule in Burma demonstrate how law, culture, media, and technology mould political experiences.
At a time when public discourse rests on an immediacy of opinion and certainty of belief, a willingness to engage with another’s ideas is a welcome act of intellectual resistance. Taking the time for a closer reading, as book reviewing would necessitate, is an intentional commitment to dialogue. As reviewers, we are required to suspend our tendency for instant judgement and privilege another’s argument before asserting our own. Disagreement must be meaningful and informed by empirical evidence, and a contradiction of one’s world view isn’t sufficient logic for a work’s dismissal. This is a reversal—subversion even—of contemporary practice. The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies and The Book Review have upheld precisely this ethic of intellectual engagement. This special collaboration, which coincides with milestone anniversaries—50 years for The Book Review and 30 years for the IPCS—is a reaffirmation of the commitment to rigorous intellectual engagement, and advancing informed, and independent, policy discourse.
Ruhee Neog is Director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Delhi.