Globalization, Democratization, Liberal Peace, and Human Security in South Asia

2019 ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Shibashis Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Human Security ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Liberal Peace ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Way

The chapter deals with three transformative theses and their possible impact and consequences in South Asia. The author examines the impacts of globalization, democratic peace, and human security to find whether these have changed elite mindsets in the subcontinent. He finds that none of these alleged changes have impacted on the way Indian and South Asian elites imagine their neighbourhood. First, globalization has divided the subcontinent along economic lines that complicate India’s neighbourhood policies further. Second, the dynamic of globalization has unfolded within the given geopolitical parameters of South Asia and, therefore, no liberal order has grown within the region. This episode brings out the disjuncture of economic and political dynamics in this region despite two decades of globalization. Third, democratic peace has no credibility in South Asia given the intense geopolitical competition between India and Pakistan that also affects the foreign policies of smaller states. The state in South Asia has dominated the agenda of non-traditional security and defined it. South Asian states continue to suffer from fears and tensions since most of these insecurities stem from within and are the products of the state.

The Baluch, Sunnism and the State in Iran

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane A. Dudoignon
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Local Democracy ◽  
Oasis Area ◽  
Shed Light

Since 2002, Sunni jihadi groups have been active in Iranian Baluchistan without managing to plunge the region into chaos. This book suggests that a reason for this, besides Tehran’s military responses, has been the quality of Khomeini and Khamenei’s relationship with a network of South-Asia-educated Sunni ulama (mawlawis) originating from the Sarbaz oasis area, in the south of Baluchistan. Educated in the religiously reformist, socially conservative South Asian Deoband School, which puts the madrasa at the centre of social life, the Sarbazi ulama had taken advantage, in Iranian territory, of the eclipse of Baluch tribal might under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79). They emerged then as a bulwark against Soviet influence and progressive ideologies, before rallying to Khomeini in 1979. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they have been playing the role of a rampart against Salafi propaganda and Saudi intrigues. The book shows that, through their alliance with an Iranian Kurdish-born Muslim-Brother movement and through the promotion of a distinct ‘Sunni vote’, they have since the early 2000s contributed towards – and benefitted from – the defence by the Reformist presidents Khatami (1997-2005) and Ruhani (since 2013) of local democracy and of the minorities’ rights. They endeavoured to help, at the same time, preventing the propagation of jihadism and Sunni radicalisation to Iran – at least until the ISIS/Daesh-claimed attacks of June 2017, in Tehran, shed light on the limits of the Islamic Republic’s strategy of reliance on Deobandi ulama and Muslim-Brother preachers in the country’s Sunni-peopled peripheries.

scholarly journals Jews and Muslims in South Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia Egorova
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Common Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Muslims In Europe ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Anti Jewish ◽  
The Way

In the European imaginary Jews and Muslims have shared a common space reserved for the ultimate other and have been constructed in opposition to each other. This book examines the way Jewish and Muslim communities encounter each other in South Asia and interact in ways that do not easily fit conventional Western tropes of Jews-Muslim relations. In doing so, the book explores how, in the history of the subcontinent, globalized discourses about Jewishness and Islam intersect and acquire different dimensions in varying sociopolitical contexts in ways that cast analytical light on the notions of race, religion, and minorities. Moving on to the contemporary period, the book demonstrates how South Asian Jewish experiences have been turned into a rhetorical tool to negate the discrimination of Muslims and argues that the ostensible celebration of Jewishness in the discourse of the Hindu and, analogously, European right masks not only anti-Muslim but also anti-Jewish prejudice. It also interrogates both those accounts that inscribe Jews and Muslims as each other’s enemies and those that imagine them as linked by a commonality of theologies, rituals, and narratives, and suggests that rather than being considered as a category of analysis, Jewish-Muslim relations would be best thematized as a construct produced by the very processes of minoritization, stigmatization, and othering that have been applied to Jews and Muslims in Europe and then globalized at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Liberalism and Security

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Owen IV
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Peace ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
International Interaction ◽  
The Individual

Liberalism has always been concerned with security, albeit the security of the individual; institutions, including the state, are all established and sustained by individuals and instrumental to their desires. Indeed, liberalism cannot be understood apart from its normative commitment to individualism. The tradition insists that all persons deserve, and it evaluates institutions according to how far they help individuals achieve these goals. Nor is liberalism anti-statist. Liberal theory has paid particular attention to the state as the institution defined by its ability to make individuals secure and aid their commodious living. Although liberal security literature that only examines individual states’ foreign policies may be guilty of denouncing the role of international interaction, the general liberal claim argues that the international system, under broad conditions, permits states choices. As such, for liberalism, states can choose over time to create and sustain international conditions under which they will be more or less secure. Liberalism’s history can be traced from the proto-liberalism in the Reformation to the emergence of the social contract theory and neo-theories, as well as liberalism’s focus on increasing security. Meanwhile, current debates in liberalism include the democratic peace and its progeny, reformulations of liberal international relations (IR) theory, and meta-theory. Ultimately, liberalism’s most striking recent successes concern the democratic peace and related research on democratic advantages in international cooperation. Liberalism is a useful guide to international security insofar as individuals and the groups they organize affect or erode states.

Association between Governance and Human Development in South Asia

2016 ◽  
pp. 254-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arindam Laha
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Human Development ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
The State ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Sustainable Human Development ◽  
Catalytic Role

Good governance could play a catalytic role in creating an enabling working environment where the dream of sustainable human development can be fulfilled, whereas poor governance could erode individual capabilities to meet even the basic needs of sustenance for vulnerable sections of the population. Under this backdrop, this study attempts to explore empirically the association between the governance and human development in the context of South Asian countries. Broadly, a converging trend of both the indices of governance and human development across South Asian countries is noticeable with the passage of time. Moreover, substantial empirical evidences suggest that the state of governance and that of level of human development are positively correlated in the sense that countries having a better functioning of governance system are also the countries with relatively high levels of human development.

scholarly journals Locating Human Security In the City: The Case of Rohingya Refugees In New Delhi

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ashvina Patel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Human Security ◽  
The State ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Primary Field ◽  
Field Site ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Urban Refugees ◽  
The City

This research examines the subjective experience of human security by Rohingya urban refugees who fled to New Delhi, India, from Myanmar, in 2012. It uses bottom-up, top-down, and historical-to-present approaches to recognize the myriad factors that influence the path to security. The bottom-up approach frames the Rohingya present-day experience; the top-down approach delineates motivations embedded in the current India state and the international refugee regime; and the past-to-present approach explains the perspectives of each of these actors. One urban refugee settlement was chosen as a primary field site to examine the challenges and varied everyday experiences of the city for migrants. Two other urban settlements were selected for supplementary participant observation and the collection of quantitative data. At my primary field site, Rohingya men and women were interviewed to assess their feeling of security (in Rohingya hefazat or in Hindi suraksha). The perceptions of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) employees, government officials, and community representative were also recorded. Human security, defined as a person-centered security, was assessed on three dimensions: political, economic, and community. Analysis of the data compelled me to focus on what I call political human security. Anthropologists theorize the embeddedness of new immigrants and resettled refugees through acts of cultural citizenship, assimilation, and integration. This study, however, demonstrates that for urban refugees their primary need is basic security. This security is inevitably political; Rohingya refugees are deemed “illegal” immigrants by the state, but are permitted to stay as protected wards of the UNHCR. They assume a refugee identity that both expose them to further exploitation, while also shielding them from starvation and disease. This politically formed identity must be negotiated in daily interaction in order to find security. India is a first country of asylum for the Rohingya in this study. No South Asian country has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, making India a good case study for how South Asia may respond to refugee influxes into urban spaces. India is unwilling to allow Muslim refugees to become naturalized citizens, pointing to religious and cultural factors that produce insecurity in the South Asia region. Furthermore, tensions rise when apolitical agencies like the UNHCR call upon India’s conservative administration to protect a population they define as undesirable. By focusing on urban refugees and their interactions with the state and supranational organizations, this research demonstrates the importance of statehood and citizenship as instruments of sovereignty that uphold human rights and protect against insecurity.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Anish Vanaik
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Planning Culture

The Introduction points to the absence of a full-fledged treatment of property in South Asian urban centres. In studying three different literatures—on property in South Asia, South Asian economic histories, and urban history—it points to the reasons why each of these bodies of work has ignored urban property. Histories of property have tended to concentrate on the countryside or forests. Economic history has downplayed economic trajectories—such as real estate speculation—that did not culminate in industrialization. Within South Asian urban history, the state (especially through planning), culture, and labour have been the most important foci. Finally, the Introduction locates the theoretical tools for studying property in the Marxist critical geography developed by geographers David Harvey and Neil Smith and the urban theorist Henri Lefebvre.

The Animal That Therefore I Am (Not): Marx as Subjectivity Theorist

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 309-330 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Real ◽  
General Line ◽  
Michel Henry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Way

The article centers on a discussion of Frank Ruda’s chapter in the anthology Reading Marx, in which he argues that the history of emancipatory thought is a series of footnotes to Plato’s Cave. In considering emancipation to be a way out of the non- or pre-human state, Marx becomes the thinker closest to Plato. According to Ruda, a critique of capitalism must be based on the refutation of the myth of the (unconditional) given, which he identifies with the ideological operation of naturalization. Capitalist naturalization dependent on abstraction and abstraction from abstraction ends by reducing the worker to the state of an animal. However, this is a strange animal that has nothing to do with real animals, and therefore should be called a non-animal. The way out of the Cave turns out to be the realization that the figure of the non-animal does not conceal within itself an unalienated substance and that no positive utopia lies beyond the Cave - on the contrary, the path to liberation leads to the Real of the shadows themselves, to a kind of negative utopia. Accepting Ruda’s general line of reasoning, the author of the article nevertheless wonders whether this interpretation that Ruda has put forward is the kind of new way to read Marx to which Reading Marx aspires. The author compares this interpretation with one from the Marxist legacy proposed by Michel Henry and with François Laruelle’s non-Marxism (which is an extension of Henry’s thought). Their example shows that naturalization could be not only a target in the criticism of capitalism but also a method for that criticism. The myth of the unconditional given has been countered by Henry with a myth about the given which coincides with its condition. Then according to non-Marxism, the myth of the givenness conditions is what is be overcome instead of the myth about the given. That argument is illustrated by Katerina Kolozova’s denunciation of the anthropocentric orientation of the critique of capitalism, which holds that the animal has been reduced to the non-animal in capitalism in exactly the same way as human beings have been and draws the conclusion that in the last instance both animal and human are generically identical.

South Asia

2020 ◽  
pp. 542-573
Author(s):  
Mehrdad Shokoohy ◽  
Natalie H. Shokoohy
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South India ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Historic Sites ◽  
North And South ◽  
The Way

In South Asian archaeology, Buddhist and Hindu sites and monuments dominate, while Muslim ones, with the exception of a few grand edifices, have never been given the priority they deserve. In India, there has been little significant excavation of any Muslim sites, but during the British period the major ones were gradually identified, some of the better-preserved monuments were restored, while the ruins, if regarded as significant, were cleared of debris and rudimentary efforts made to preserve the standing remains. After Partition, the Archaeological Survey of India continued to maintain Muslim sites such as those in Delhi; the forts and monuments of Bidar, Bijapur, Daulatabad, and Gulbarga in the Deccan; scattered remains in Gaur and Pandua (the site of Laknautī, the Muslim capital of Bengal); and the monuments in Jaunpur (Uttar Pradesh) and Sasaram in Bihar. The monuments of Ahmadabad and some other towns of Gujarat have been more extensively studied. Whatever has been undertaken in the way of fresh exploration in North and South India has been mainly by independent scholars and experts. In Pakistan, some excavation has been carried out in the early Muslim sites, including at Banbhore, the site of the ancient port of Daibul, and at Brahmanābād, the site of al-Manṣūra, the seat of the Arab governor of Sind, both dating from the first and second century of the Hijra. In Bangladesh, the historic sites already restored before Partition have been maintained, but funds and resources to carry out fresh excavations or restoration are lacking. Much is left for present and future archaeologists to explore.

Existence, location, possession, and copula in Malabar Indo-Portuguese

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57
Author(s):  
Ana Krajinović
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Salient Features ◽  
Asian Languages ◽  
The Way

Abstract This paper offers a diachronic and a contact-based analysis of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in Malabar Indo-Portuguese creole (MIP). The existential, locative, and possessive predicates are all expressed with the copulative verb tæ, and nominal and property-denoting predicates can either have the copula tæ or zero copula. I analyze these copulative constructions by establishing their sources in the Portuguese lexifier and Malayalam substrate/adstrate. I show that although the Portuguese verbs ter ‘have’ and estar ‘be’ have paved the way to the semantics of tæ, Malayalam had a strong impact on the morphosyntax and semantics of existential, locative, possessive, and copulative constructions in MIP. This influence is most notable in the case of possessives, which take dative subjects. These findings are compared to the relevant structures in other South Asian languages and show that the existence of locative possession is a strong areal feature of South Asia. I also show that the variability of copula usage in nominal and property-denoting predicates can be explained by variable input from Portuguese and Malayalam copulative constructions. One of the most salient features influenced by Malayalam is the choice of what are etymologically Portuguese nouns instead of adjectives in property-denoting predicates.

scholarly journals The Changing Narrative of Security Discourse: From State Security to Human Security in South Asia?

World Affairs ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 183 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-205
Author(s):  
Sujit Lahiry
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Human Development ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
State Security ◽  
Security Discourse ◽  
First Time

Security discourse has radically changed over the years, especially since the Post–Cold War period. The traditional concept focuses on state security and national security, and is essentially based on realist and neo-realist paradigms. However, in 1994, the United Nations Human Development Report for the first time elaborated the notion of human security and the associated Human Development Index (HDI). Human security advocates a people-centric approach to security. The two foundational principles on which human security is based are “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” I evaluate the notions of state security versus human security and examine how South Asian countries have fared regarding the human security indices. I conclude that, despite advances in some areas, various HDI parameters show that the human security record is still rather dismal in South Asia. There remains a critical need to improve it.

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