Tag Archives: International Relations

Asma Faiz’s excellent book on Sindhi nationalism fills a much needed gap on ethnicity and ethnic conflict in Pakistan. Works on ethnicity in Pakistan—both research articles and books—have focused on providing a more general outline of ethnic conflict and movements including that of Tahir Amin, Adeel Khan, Mehtab Ali Shah or have focused more…

Abdul Basit’s book consistently shows that he eschewed the role of an envoy during his assignment in India; instead, becoming a rigid zealot, he became a bone stuck in the throat of his government. An elected and secure government would have reassigned him quickly enough. That Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif did not do so was on account of Pakistan’s…

Amid the forest of debates about the relations between history and biography one line of disputation stands out, that between the promoters and detractors of the Great Man Theory. Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Scottish historian was its most well known promoter; he famously said that the history of the world is but the biography of great men…

In the nineteenth century, the Wuyi Mountains in northwest Fujian emerged as a key centre of China’s famed tea industry. Located in the mountain cliffs were more than a hundred factories producing a global commodity that had become integral to the country’s economic fortunes. The factories were maintained by merchants based in the market town of Chongan…

In school, I had always noticed ‘China (Tibet)’ or ‘Tibet (China)’  on maps showing India’s borders and wondered why no one talked about it, why the fuss was always about Pakistan. And in those days there really were not too many places to go looking for information either. So when the ‘Tiananmen Incident’ of June 4, 1989  happened in China…

The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed area measuring 3.6 million square kilometres in the Pacific Ocean. It spreads from the Straits of Malacca and Karimata to Taiwan Straits and is bordered in the north by China and Taiwan, the Philippines in the East, Brunei and Malaysia in the south, and Vietnam in the West. It contains numerous islands…

The rapid deterioration of China’s relations with India over the past year has generated voluminous literature. Kingshuk Nag’s contribution to this body of work, A New Silk Road is an excellent primer on the India-China bilateral relationship.  Nag takes a very hawkish position throughout this book and perceives China…

China is arguably India’s most important bilateral relationship and its foremost foreign and security policy challenge. India-China ties are complex and fraught. Kanti Bajpai presents these in an accessible way. His analysis, based on years of research and thinking, is refined and expressed lucidly. The conclusions he draws are stark and maybe disagreeable…

Pan-Asianism is a general term used to describe a wide range of ideas and movements that called for the solidarity of Asian peoples to counter western influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concept of Pan-Asianism first emerged in Japan sometime in the late 19th century. The movement gained wider acceptance following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).

Those who have read Shivshankar Menon’s first book, Choices, would be familiar with his sharp analytical skills and ability to cut through a mass of disparate detail to focus on underlying patterns that tell a coherent story. Choices pegged its learnings from a set of specific events in which he himself was involved as a practitioner…

Ananth Krishnan’s book is a refreshing take on a topic India has grossly underinvested in. It is well known that dealing with its neighbour has been one of the most significant challenges confronting India’s foreign policy-makers; however, a very honest and sincere attempt to understand China from multiple lenses has been elusive. Discourses on China in India have been captive to the ghosts…

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…