March 2021

The Indian subcontinent is a single, coherent and interdependent geopolitical space...

Some books are read for who has written it; some are for the contents, and some for style. One should read Dr S Jaishankar’s book titled The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World for all the above three. A former Foreign Secretary of India and now its...

The statement that ‘India’s destiny is to be the Jagat Guru or Vishwa Bandhu’ is a consensual common sense that evolved through India’s freedom movement. One of the raison d’être for India’s Independence, as argued by many national leaders, was its potential to lead the world...

Post-Conflict Reconstruction: From Extremism to Peaceful Co-Existence puts under the lens the principal causes of state fragility which creates an enabling environment for violent religious extremism. The author takes up six case studies of different countries covering the Asian and African...

Wars formed an essential part of human existence for millennia playing a significant role in shaping the lives and history of humans. Over time, the nature, type, and intensity of wars have profoundly changed. Diverse cultures look at wars differently; while most of them glorify them...

Professor Yan Xuetong, a Distinguished Professor, and Dean in Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University has been a leading Chinese public intellectual and a theorist in the field of International relations. He has produced an incredible body of work...

Why have India and China failed to arrive at a lasting solution to their respective territorial claims? Given the recent deterioration in India-China relations, this puzzle is the issue du jour not only in the strategic and academic community but also among the mass public...

China has always been an enigma and is considered to be  a mysterious riddle to be solved. Her aggressive and belligerent approach and attitude towards the world at large and India in particular during the time of the pandemic has left everyone wondering about her psyche...

One of the most prominently featured characters in Barbara Demick’s new book is called Gonpo. Born in 1950, a year after Mao Zedong declares a ‘New China’, she is the daughter of a King in Amdo, a region on the eastern end of the Tibetan Plateau in what is modern-day Sichuan...

Edited volumes are usually difficult to pull off—even when the editors have a clear set of questions outlined and terms defined, contributors might not follow the memo. The final output might look quite different from the planned outcome. But that is still fine as long...

The quest for ‘National Rejuvenation’ has become the buzz word since Xi Jinping has come to power. Scholars and students of Chinese studies have been trying to understand what this actually entails. There is also a need to understand what ‘National Rejuvenation’ includes...

India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S Jaishankar speaking at the Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture in November 2019 noted that the world is not only different but is undergoing a structural transaformation.[1]The statement underlines the fact that the challenges India faces to its growth...

Partly, Jinnah’s career marches quite neatly with the themes of the twentieth century’s international history. The ‘minorities question’ that bedevilled the politics of inter-war Europe thoroughly drained the League of Nations almost entirely of its authority...

For decades now, Pakistan’s descent into extremism has been unsparing and steep. Hence, there is abundant literature centred around the country’s violence and security landscape. In this context, any work that deviates from this oft-treaded pattern comes across as a breath of fresh air...

Just as governments around the world are scrutinizing the political power of social media, comes a new novel by the London-based Pakistani author Moni Mohsin whose plot revolves around that very subject. The Impeccable Integrity of Ruby R. charts the journey of an ambitious...

Mobilizing the Marginalized by Amit Ahuja is an important contribution to the literature on social movements, party and the party system, ethnic politics and public policy. The book fills a vital theoretical gap in the literature on social and electoral mobilization...

In 1899, George Curzon started from Shimla on his first tour of India as the Viceroy and, made Delhi his first halt. He spoke at a ceremony at the Town Hall, the office of the Municipal Department of Delhi, and extolled them for the ‘great and remarkable development’ done in the city...

In a country obsessed with religion as an intrinsically embedded component of social life, only two things compete with religion for attention in the popular imagination of India: cricket and politics. The recent Test series held in Australia, in which an Indian team...

In the last several decades, history of emotions has emerged as an important field in South Asian historiography. Enriched with interdisciplinary insights, the field has introduced fresh perspectives on the role of feelings in shaping historical change...

Rebellious Lord</em> is a delightful account by Meghnad Desai of his journey from middle class Vadodara and Mumbai to a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and then to the London School of Economics, and a life in academia and Left politics in the United Kingdom...

This autobiography is the journey of a distinguished Police Officer RK Raghavan, who handled events/cases impacting recent political history of the country. He frequently hit the media headlines, from the tragic assassination at Sriperumbudur of a former...

Chaulia argues that Trump’s upending of liberal internationalism has created opportunities for these powers to emerge as regional powers and to carve out a space for themselves in the global order with the right leadership. Trump has created a vacuum in international politics through his isolationism...

For an unduly long period of time, envronment asi a field of study had been classified as distinct from ‘core’ disciplines such as Political Science and History. In and of itself, it has been considered important, but bringing in lessons from the study of environment...

Patriarchy and the Pangolin: A Field Guide to Indian Men and Other Species is a book about two environmentalists who are women as well as researchers. It is important at the outset to state their gender identities, as the premise of the book is based on this shared...

Pottekkat’s short stories partake ‘broadly speaking of both the romantic idealism and the grand and radical social vision embodied by his novels’, says PP Raveendran in his foreword to The Story of the Timepiece. This collection of 16 of the author’s short stories bears testimony to that comment...