Himadeep Muppidi - Böcker

India and South Africa, two states that bookended the process of twentieth century decolonization, punched above their weight in global politics in their initial years of liberation. Postscripts on Independence analyses and compares the making of foreign policy ideas, identities, and institutions of postcolonial India and South Africa. It shows how both countries have responded to the contradictory demands of their freedom struggles against colonialism and pragmatic challenges of international politics. Vineet Thakur argues that the countries' geopolitical positioning in South Asia and southern Africa make them regional powers, with similar sets of problems and prospects, as both continue to grapple with the idea of maintaining regional and/or continental hegemony. By undertaking a comparative analysis, he explores a framework to understand the foreign policymaking fears, aspirations, and international behaviour of these two states.

The work focuses on a subaltern local sovereignty movement called "Telangana" in India. Over the last ten years, this movement has engaged in a massive political mobilization, including strikes, rallies, work stoppages, occupation of public spaces, electoral contests, 200 and more political suicides and media battles. But, interestingly enough, notwithstanding a political mobilization that has brought day-to-day life to a halt on a number of occasions, it has remained largely invisible in international media and global politics. Fascinated by the social movement’s international invisibility as well as the causes and conditions of its eruption around a city/region that has become a showcase of new capitalist development, Muppidi seeks to unpack this issue, showing that this invisibility is not just intrinsically puzzling, but also represents the operation of power on a global scale. Investigating the conditions of invisibility in this instance can therefore tell us something important about the way global power works to produce visibility and invisibility in the 21st century world. This book provides a unique resource for students of Postcolonalism, International relations and South East Asian studies.

Is it possible to rearticulate the relationship between Europe and its others in non-colonizing ways? Europe and Its Boundaries reflects upon this question, first by exploring several philosophical approaches to Europe's relation to non-Europe, then by examining that relationship in specific intellectual and material contexts of European domination. The philosophical approaches are explored through the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Departing from the routine recognition of Europe's hegemonic role in constituting global political modernity, the authors examine fundamental political and ethical questions of coloniality, anti-coloniality, post-coloniality, mutual recognition, hospitality, responsibility, justice, and democracy. Regarding the intellectual and material contexts, the book explores the production of Europe and its relation to others in highly significant moments and sites of meaning making in European history and politics, from battles and monuments on its western and eastern territorial boundaries to museum exhibitions and immigrant detention centers, that is, new forms of borders at its very core. Europe and Its Boundaries thus reconsiders historical and contempoarary understandings of Europe, border politics, and global encounters more broadly. This book will find an audience among scholars of political theory, international relations, geography, cultural studies, history, and post-colonial studies.