India’s Rise

Author(s):  
Sunil Khilnani

How should India’s rise be understood in the framework of international relations and a changing global order? This chapter assesses India’s jostle for an advantageous position on the world stage through three sets of lenses: the attempt to voice the civilizational values of a nascent nation; the expressions of the economic and developmental needs of a poor citizenry; and the self-professed aims and pursuits of the interests of a sovereign state. It then outlines some of the challenges in defining India’s international position, and explores possible means through which these can be navigated. In order to optimize the rewards of India’s interactions with the global order, deft management of all three approaches is necessary, enabled by a recognition of the fact that its greatest strength lies in the ability to articulate a democratically validated foreign policy.

Author(s):  
David M. Malone ◽  
C. Raja Mohan ◽  
Srinath Raghavan

India has emerged as a leading voice in global affairs in the past two decades. Its fast-growing domestic market largely explains the ardour with which Delhi is courted by powers great and small. India is also becoming increasingly important to global geostrategic calculations, being the only Asian country with the heft to counterbalance China over time. Nevertheless, India’s foreign policy has been relatively neglected in the existing literature. ThisHandbook, edited by three widely recognized students of the topic, provides an extensive survey of India’s external relations. The authors include leading Indian scholars and commentators of the field and several outstanding foreign scholars and practitioners. They address factors in Indian foreign policy flowing from both history and geography and also discuss key relationships, issues, and multilateral forums through which the country’s international relations are refracted.


2018 ◽  
pp. 603-612
Author(s):  
Serhii Esaulov

The author raises the issue of settling conflicts around the world and discusses modern attempts to establish law and order. Particular attention is paid to the intricate relations between Hungary and Ukraine. With Russia’s aggression against Ukraine there was ruined a system of international relations, which provided for the rule of law, the right to settle disputes without applying military tools, force or threats. Russia initiated a new precedent of impunity, insolent violation of the fundamental norms of international law, and demonstrated the world how the borders may be redrawn as one sees fit and “bring historical justice”. The author notes that one of the reasons for the escalation of the conflict between Hungary and Ukraine has become the language issue. Still, however pity it is, all attempts of the Ukrainian side to resolve conflict matters have appeared to be vane, since Budapest is reluctant to listen to and consider any arguments of Kyiv, being fully distracted by its demand. It is hard to imagine that in civilized “old” Europe, Germany, for instance, would express claims or even threaten France for the fact that pupils in schools of the French region of Alsace (until 1918, its territory formed part of Germany that attempted to annex it at times of the Second World War) are taught in the official language – French, not in the language of the neighbouring country, even though the Alsatian and German languages are equally spoken there. Unfortunately, Hungary seems not to be ready to follow the example of the Franco-German reconciliation in terms of relations with all neighbours, despite the philosophy of its membership in the EU and NATO. The revenge-seeking attitudes of the Hungarian political establishment regarding the revision of borders according to the Versailles and Yalta systems of international relations are constantly boosted in all directions in the neighbouring countries, where ethnic Hungarians live (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine). The so-called “formula of protecting interests of Russian citizens in Crimea and Donbas” adopted from Putin has apparently laid the foundation for the foreign policy strategy of V. Orban. First, as regards the appeal to make the region of ethnic Hungarians’ residence autonomous and subsequently – the appeal to hold a referendum on separation. The author summarizes that along with the political and diplomatic efforts, a substantial role in easing the tension in relations with Budapest should be played by non-governmental organizations and the expert community though holding forums and scientific conferences aiming at discussing the above-mentioned issues. Keywords: Hungary, conflict, Law on Language, geopolitics, strategies, foreign policy, Ukraine.


Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572110612
Author(s):  
Matteo Capasso

This article brings together two cases to contribute to the growing body of literature rethinking the study of international relations (IR) and the Global South: The Libyan Arab al-Jamāhīrīyah and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Drawing on media representations and secondary literature from IR and international political economy (IPE), it critically examines three main conceptual theses (authoritarian, rentier, and rogue) used to describe the historical socio-political formations of these states up to this date. Mixing oil abundance with authoritarian revolutionary fervour and foreign policy adventurism, Libya and Venezuela have been progressively reduced to the figure of one man, while presenting their current crises as localized processes delinked from the imperialist inter-state system. The article argues that these analyses, if left unquestioned, perpetuate a US-led imperial ordering of the world, while foreclosing and discrediting alternatives to capitalist development emerging from and grounded in a Global South context. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing and controversial debate on the meanings and needs for decolonizing the study of IR.


Author(s):  
Dominic Lieven

This lecture discusses empire in its entirety across the millennia and across all the regions of the world. It presents an argument that power in its many manifestations is the core and essence of the empire. The lecture also seeks to address the concerns of both historians and students of international relations. It stresses the crucial significance of power in a way that is more familiar to international relations scholars than to many contemporary historians of empire. Finally, the lecture shows how important empire has been in shaping the contemporary global order, and that it still has much to tell about the nature of modern international politics.


Author(s):  
Simon Duke ◽  
Sophie Vanhoonacker

This chapter focuses on the European Union as a subsystem of international relations. It examines the following questions, taking into account the historical context in which EU foreign policy has developed as well as the theoretical pluralism that has characterized its study. First, how has the EU dealt with its own international relations internally? Second, what are the ideas and principles underlying EU foreign policy? Third, what is the EU's collective action capacity in relation to the rest of the world? The chapter illustrates interstate dynamics as a result of European integration by focusing on the cases of France, Germany, and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). It also considers the EU's international identity and its role as a collective actor.


Fascism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jackson

Abstract This article will survey the transnational dynamics of the World Union of National Socialists (wuns), from its foundation in 1962 to the present day. It will examine a wide range of materials generated by the organisation, including its foundational document, the Cotswolds Declaration, as well as membership application details, wuns bulletins, related magazines such as Stormtrooper, and its intellectual journals, National Socialist World and The National Socialist. By analysing material from affiliated organisations, it will also consider how the network was able to foster contrasting relationships with sympathetic groups in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, allowing other leading neo-Nazis, such as Colin Jordan, to develop a wider role internationally. The author argues that the neo-Nazi network reached its height in the mid to late 1960s, and also highlights how, in more recent times, the wuns has taken on a new role as an evocative ‘story’ in neo-Nazi history. This process of ‘accumulative extremism’, inventing a new tradition within the neo-Nazi movement, is important to recognise, as it helps us understand the self-mythologizing nature of neo-Nazi and wider neo-fascist cultures. Therefore, despite failing in its ambitions of creating a Nazi-inspired new global order, the lasting significance of the wuns has been its ability to inspire newer transnational aspirations among neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Marcos Cardoso dos Santos

Abstract This article examines the complementarities among Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field, and Huysmans’s conception of discursive security strategy as a mediator of people’s relation to death. The interplay among these theories explains how hegemonic security discourses emerge. The self-referential aspect of the Copenhagen School’s Securitisation Theory (ST) does not contradict the existence of a relation of forces among securitising actors and audiences in given security fields, based on the ownership of social capital. This article rejects the theoretical positions adopted by Bigo, Tsoukala and Balzacq in terms of which ST is regarded as intersubjective. Utilising the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, it is possible to verify how hegemonic security discourses are determined. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and Huysmans’s premises about security strategy also have implications for ST, mainly for the discussions about whether it has an intersubjective or self-referential aspect. As discourses of danger construct the political identities of states, the study of their influence on foreign policy is relevant to international relations. This article concludes that when the degree of otherness gets closer to the radical Other, extraordinary measures are easily tolerated by the agents involved in the securitisation process.


Author(s):  
Lior Herman

Oil and natural gas have frequently been used as instruments of foreign policy. While scholars have given substantial attention to the economics of exports and imports, much less has been paid to theorizing how energy can be its own type of carrot or stick, influencing international relations around the world. Future scholarship should focus on developing foreign policy theories specific to energy, including renewable energy sources and drawing on constructivist theories. In addition, the role of transit states, energy firms, sovereign wealth funds, and civil society should be more carefully theorized. Future theoretical and empirical research should also focus on the use of electricity and renewable energies as foreign policy instruments and their effects on global politics.


Author(s):  
Paul Carrese

Consideration of the relationship between political theory and foreign policy must confront stark realities a quarter century after the 1991 liberal-democratic victory in the Cold War, which established the first global order in history. The foreign policies of the liberal democracies, and the liberal global order, now are beset by confusion, division, and retreat in the face of illiberal powers. A wave of nationalism and suspicion of globalized elites compounds the failure by America, the leading liberal democracy, to forge a consensus grand strategy to replace the Cold War strategy of American internationalism and containment of Communism. While important scholarship in comparative political theory addresses foreign policy, and while there are other important foci for the theory-policy nexus, such as China or the Islamic world, this failure to develop a new strategy to undergird global order and manage globalization is the most pressing issue for political theory in relation to foreign policy. Scholars should inquire whether the policy failures of the past quarter century stem not only from policymakers but also from the divisions among schools of international relations and foreign policy—and especially from the abstract, dogmatic quality of these theories. A more productive theory-policy nexus is evident in the rediscovery of the transdisciplinary tradition of grand strategy, which offers a more balanced approach to theory and its role in guiding policy. A new grand strategy for our globalized era would manage and sustain the powerful processes and forces set in motion by liberal states that now are eluding guidance from any widely recognized and effective rules. Four important critiques since 1991 discern a disservice to foreign policy by the high theory of the international relations schools. These schools—including realism, liberal internationalism, and constructivism—and their policy guidance are discussed elsewhere. The first two critiques arise from contemporary international relations and foreign policy approaches: scholars addressing the gap between high theory and practitioners, and Chris Brown and David A. Lake assessing the extremes of high theory that prove unhelpful for guiding sound foreign policies and practical judgement. The final two critiques transcend recent social science to rediscover fundamentals presupposed by the first two, by quarrying the philosophical tradition on international affairs from the ancient Greeks to modernity. This line of analysis points to recent work by the leading embodiment of the theory-policy nexus in the past half-century, Henry Kissinger—because his book World Order (2014) turns from realism to a more balanced view of interests and ideals in the policies of liberal democracies. Kissinger confronts the vexing reality of the need for reasonable states, across civilizational traditions, to forge a basic global order to replace the crumbling liberal order. His approach is grand strategy, now made comparative and global, as both more profound and effective for theorists and practitioners. Further, the tradition of American grand strategy is an important resource for all the liberal democracies now committed to this policy effort. Since the Washington administration, a balanced approach of discerning America’s enlightened self-interest has been the core of its successful grand strategies. This is not pragmatism, given the philosophical roots of this liberal disposition in the moderate Enlightenment jurists Grotius and Montesquieu. An era of confusion and failure should provoke reconsideration of fundamentals. Rediscovery of enlightened self-interest and its call for statesmanlike judgement offers a fruitful theory-policy nexus for the liberal democracies and for restoration of a basic global order.


2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-586
Author(s):  
Peya Mushelenga

This article discusses aspects of Namibia’s foreign policy principles and how they impact on the values of democracy, and issue of peace and security in the region. The article will focus on the attainment of peace in Angola, democratisation of South Africa, and security situations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Madagascar and Lesotho. The main question of this article is: To what extent has Namibia realised the objectives encapsulated in her foreign policy principles of striving for international peace and security and promote the values of democracy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region? The assumption is that though relatively a newly established state, Namibia has made her contribution towards democracy, peace and security in the Southern Africa region and the world at large.


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