Indrajit Roy - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. China's resurgence has spawned anxieties about an impending revision of the Liberal International Order. Drawing on case studies of Chinese investments across Europe, the contributors to this volume investigate the ways in which China translates its growing resources into effective influence, with varying degrees of success. They find that influence is most effectively achieved by harnessing the agency of states and societies in Europe towards China's preferences. Fragmented and messy rather than unified and coherent, these preferences comprise an amalgam of domestic, regional, and international considerations rather than aimed at revising world order. Nevertheless, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the interaction of European agency and Chinese preferences could have a variety of unintended consequences that range from straining the Liberal International Order to strengthening it. Against narratives that foreground inevitable conflict or assured cooperation, Rising Power, Limited Influence innovates a dynamic framework to understand the granular ways in which states and societies in Europe interact with state and society in China to (re-)shape the Liberal International Order. Its contribution is three-fold. Conceptually, it offers a relational definition of power that pinpoints attention to the ways in which China translates its growing investments in Europe towards influencing the preferences of host countries. Empirically, it outlines the different modalities through which China harnesses the agency of European countries towards its own (fragmented) preferences. Theoretically, the book introduces a dynamic framework to understand the interaction between state-society relations in China with state-society relations in European countries to comprehensively appreciate the extent, limits, and modalities of resurgent China's global influence.

This book challenges the ongoing scholarly debates on poor people's negotiations with democracy. It demonstrates the varied ways in which the poor engage with their elected representatives, political mediators and dominant classes in order to advance their claims. Roy explains the variations by directing attention to the dynamic interaction between the opportunity structures available to the poor and the social relations of power in which they are embedded. He analyses these intersections as 'political spaces' which both enable and constrain popular practices. Through examination of the 'political spaces' available to the poor in four different localities, Roy outlines a new analytic framework to understanding poor people's politics. Based on these observations, the book makes a strong case for an approach to democracy that appreciates people's ambivalences towards democracy. Roy urges researchers of democracy to step beyond either enthusiastic narratives - the inevitability of democracy or apocalyptic accounts of democracy's impending death.

In May 2019, Narendra Modi won the world’s largest election. Defying expectations, he led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a resounding victory, with the highest vote share for any party in thirty years, and was re-elected as India’s Prime Minister.What accounts for the scale of Modi’s win? Why, despite economic hardship and social strife, did Indians vote so overwhelmingly for him and the BJP? This book explains the economic, social and cultural processes that shaped political passions in India during the spring and summer of 2019. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain Modi’s win. Together, the contributors compel us to take seriously the ‘structures of feeling’ in politics.Love him or hate him, Modi secured for himself a decisive re-election as India’s Prime Minister. Passionate politics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how that happened.

In May 2019, Narendra Modi won the world’s largest election. Defying expectations, he led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a resounding victory, with the highest vote share for any party in thirty years, and was re-elected as India’s Prime Minister.What accounts for the scale of Modi’s win? Why, despite economic hardship and social strife, did Indians vote so overwhelmingly for him and the BJP? This book explains the economic, social and cultural processes that shaped political passions in India during the spring and summer of 2019. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain Modi’s win. Together, the contributors compel us to take seriously the ‘structures of feeling’ in politics.Love him or hate him, Modi secured for himself a decisive re-election as India’s Prime Minister. Passionate politics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how that happened.

With India under growing scrutiny over the erosion of its democracy since 2014, worldwide media coverage has revealed our poor grasp of it as a modern nation. In this book, Indrajit Roy sets out to understand modern Indians on their own terms. Beyond the usual polarising narratives—either pious platitudes to the ‘world’s largest democracy’, or laments over its ‘democratic backsliding’— Roy reveals the remarkable 75-year achievement of building a democratic nation in a country weathering mass poverty, severe inequality and deep social conflict. He also exposes how this process unfolds on the ground, telling the story of a nation-state via glimpses into how Indians have thought of themselves, the world and their place in it. Indians charts the evolution of a people’s identity since the spectacle, frenzy and hope of independence in 1947, and the republican constitution introduced in 1950. This is both a high-political history and, more importantly, an account of that history’s interplay with the nebulous complex of ideas and passions that go into making, unmaking and remaking a democratic nation. Roy’s astute political biography of the Indian people is, ultimately, a tale of how one democracy influences, and is shaped by, its economy, society and culture.