Contemporary Policy Challenges

International Relations (IR) theory has been a relative latecomer to South Asia. Until a few years ago, much of the IR literature in South Asia—and indeed on South Asia—had been unabashedly untheoretical. But the last decade has seen a flowering of very deliberately theoretical work in South Asian IR. This flowering was made possible by renewed interest in South Asia in American academia and by a growing crop of South Asian IR scholars, some of them trained outside the region. It has been propelled by a strong sense among many South Asian IR scholars that the region had neither engaged with nor contributed much to the global IR theory debates and by a determined commitment to reverse this lacuna. E. Sridharan has been at the forefront in this endeavour. This two volume set of essays was preceded by an earlier collection of South Asian IR theory works focused on nuclear weapons and deterrence in the region which also Sridharan edited. And several years back, Kanti Bajpai and Siddharth Mallavarapu edited another two volume set of Indian IR theory essays.