Shibashis Chatterjee

• PhD
• Professor at Jadavpur University

Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing curiosity in examining India’s foreign policy, which has resulted in a substantial collection of scholarly works. This can be attributed to India’s emergence as a major power in the new millennium. Indian foreign policy has been scrutinized by scholars, despite the gap between its rhetoric and...

As the world transitions from a US-led unipolar system to a multipolar order, the intersection of political and military balances shapes the landscape of global stability and order. The rise of revisionist powers and the erosion of Western dominance challenge the status quo, while economic crises and the COVID-19 pandemic amplify uncertainties. Geo...

Did the pandemic produce an effect in the nature of politics in West Bengal? Despite an intuition that a pandemic of such unprecedented nature and scale would give rise to politics with a difference, evidence suggests that the politics of the pandemic is rooted in continuities rather than ruptures. The paper takes the case of the Indian province of...

India has used civilizational discourses as part of its foreign policy to articulate its rise and rightful place in the world order. This article primarily examines India's civilizational arguments in south Asia. India's civilizational arguments in the region demand scrutiny as the neighbourhood is a theatre of contestation between territorial Indi...

India’s centre-heavy federalism suffered dual downturns in the 1990s, with the tides of globalization and economic liberalization challenging the sanctity of borders and the incidence of coalition politics increasing the salience of regional equations and demands. But Indian foreign policy in the 1990s remained the almost exclusive preserve of the...

India’s centre-heavy federalism suffered dual downturns in the 1990s, with the tides of globalization and economic liberalization challenging the sanctity of borders and the incidence of coalition politics increasing the salience of regional equations and demands. But Indian foreign policy in the 1990s remained the almost exclusive preserve of the...

This chapter is an attempt to explain the refugee situation in South Asia as we try to unpack how refugees are made, why they are seldom owned up by their home or host states, and the imperatives that guide the state’s gaze at them. In three interrelated arguments, we explain how refugees are part of the constitutive practise of modern South Asia....

Public histories are narratives straddling across space and time, challenging the inside/outside distinction. Indian foreign policy makers have engaged in a selective remembering of the past in an attempt to script the making of a postcolonial state. The study takes up three cases from India’s foreign policy in elucidating how different imagination...

Borders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at th...

This paper argues that there is no strong evidence of any politics of recognition emerging from within the contours of Left politics in West Bengal. While the Centre constantly indulged in ‘the historic neglect’ of Bengal by a set of deliberately ruinous policies dwarfing her industrial growth, the bhadralok politicians of the Left Front government...

Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India’s foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centris...

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 Sou...

The chapter explains the chosen conceptual categories, clarifies the tropes of their deployment, and stitches together the two dual narratives of India’s domestic and external imaginations. The author goes on to show that India’s transforming models of nation building have evolved within the framework of sovereign territoriality. He also makes the...

This chapter is about how spatial imagination steeped in sovereign territoriality bedeviled local efforts to achieve a viable regional political community in South Asia. I invoke functional, security community, and post-colonial perspectives to interrogate regionalism in South Asia. This chapter shows that despite all South Asian states agreeing up...

The chapter accounts for the growth of territorial nationalism and realism undergirding India’s security thinking in South Asian. The author concentrates here on the political and security narratives of Indian elites and shows how they have thought about India’s security primarily in realist, geopolitical terms. He also shows that while the perspec...

Spatial imaginations evolve. One such major spatial experiment has been India’s Look East/Act East policy that is the subject of this chapter. This chapter reads the genesis of India’s Look East policy in two spatial registers. First, this policy was reflected in India’s urge to redefine its neighbourhood as it finds itself bogged down in its immed...

The central argument of the article is that West Bengal’s regionalism is a two level game. The state’s predominant regionalism is financial, set in antagonistic terms vis-à-vis the Centre. This financial or economic regionalism is paradigmatic to West Bengal. The tragedy of Partition; exceptional sensitivity to any prospect of further loss of terri...

Conventional international relations (IR) builds on Western problems and remain fixated on the Western understanding of war and conflict. Such ontology is grossly misleading to reflect upon and make sense of conflicts of the non-Western world. Western theories are based on ontological imaginations that are removed from the historical and sociologic...

The concept of human security evolved as a natural corollary to the highly attractive idea of human development, that redefined the notion of developed as transcending the traditional economist yardsticks such as national Gross Domestic Products (GDPs) and growth rates. Human security seemed attractive to the Western donor states who were dissatisf...

This chapter examines the importance of borders in the analysis of international relations. It identifies the three main discernible and distinctive frames of references of writings by Indian scholars. These include the realist paradigm, the notion of border as space, and the communitarian framework. The analysis in this study shows that internatio...

The success of India's democracy hinges on the pivotal role played by its auxiliary institutions in negotiating major challenges through slow and persistent transformation. However, an objective audit of the performance of these institutions in the recent past would indicate a decline in operations and an acute crisis of corruption. Key institution...

The chapter analyses the major theoretical problems of neo-/structural realism, subsuming a detailed examination of its paradigmatic evolution in the areas of research on alliances and polarity, the varieties of contemporary neo-realism(s), and relating structural realism to the making of foreign policy. The author applies structural realism to und...

The chapter attempts to deconstruct the mainstream discourses on South Asian Security in general and that of India in particular. It discusses the themes and major differences between the broad theoretical strands of critical and post-modernist thinking in International Relations. The chapter highlights the principal features of the dominant securi...

Iraq was an oil‐rich country with a dictatorship trying to steer an autonomous course, which brought it into confrontation with the US as the Cold War ended. During the Cold War, Iraq's geopolitical and strategic significance had brought Saddam Hussein gains. Holding together a state divided between ethnic and sectarian identities of the Iraqi Sunn...

Iraq's modern history begins from the eighteenth century with the gradual penetration of western trade and capital as a byproduct of Ottoman Turkish agreements with the western powers, primarily through the commercial agency of the British East India Company. The early nationalism came in the form of urban opposition to Ottoman rule. In particular,...

A watershed in Iraq's modern history, this revolution was responsible for creating the broad parameter within which the vicissitudes of Iraq's sociopolitical contradictions took shape. The advent of the Allied armed forces during World War II meant a sudden rise in market demand for commodities backed up by good purchasing power. The wreckage of th...

There are three possible future articulations of India's Look East policy, each underpinned by a different conceptual orientation. Firstly, the Look East policy might be conceived as an extended security trajectory to project India's legitimate power and resist growing Chinese domination of the region. A second vision sees the Look East drive prima...

This article is an attempt to employ the constructivism of Alexander Wendt to understand ethnic conflicts in South Asia. The article surveys the theoretical literature on constructivism to create a set of propositions regarding ethnic conflicts and attempts to test these propositions for several of South Asia's ethnic conflicts. The article argues...

This paper surveys the two images of the global order, which are described as the images of power and culture. The article describes the power and cultural images of the global order and then tests the applicability of the two images by comparing their plausibility. The image of power is held by the realists who describe the international system as...

The present article is an attempt to explain this continued relevance of the state. The purpose is to bring out the multi-dimensionality of the state, to highlight the legacy of dissatisfaction against the state, to analyze the impact of globalization of national economies and information technology upon the state, and to explain why the state has...

During the preceding two decades, several major trends in theorization about international relations have emerged within the academic discipline of interational relations (IR) mostly in the US but also in continental Europe. However, amongst these comparatively recent developments in International Relations theory, how much really is in the nature...