Jayashree Vivekanandan – författare

The book interrogates the disciplinary biases and firewalls that inform mainstream international relations today, and problematises the several tropes that have come to typify the strategic histories of post-colonial societies such as India. Questioning a range of long-held cultural representations on India, the book challenges such portrayals and underscores the centrality of context and contingency in any cultural explanation of state behaviour. It argues for a historico-cultural understanding of power and critiques IR’s tendency to usher in a selective ‘return of history’. Taking two contrasting case studies from medieval Indian history, the book assesses the success and failure of the grand strategy pursued by the Mughal empire under Akbar. The study emphasises his grand strategy of accommodation, defined by the interplay of critical variables such as distance and the vast military labour market. The book also looks at his conscious attempt to indigenise power by projecting himself as the personification of the ideal Hindu king. This case study helps to contextualise the many critical transitions that occurred in international relations: from medieval empires to the modern state system, and from an indigenised, experiential understanding of power to its absolute, abstract manifestations in the colonial state.

This book explores South Asia's postcolonial politics through the lens of circulatory networks—of objects, people, and ideas—as the region navigated pivotal historical junctures. The contributors reexamine epochal moments in South Asia's international relations, including the Second World War, the 1947 Partition, and the 1971 Liberation War, drawing insights from social history, memory studies, and popular discourses. Through thematic case studies, the historically informed contributions illuminate the complex entanglements between elite and everyday politics. By investigating diverse sites—borderlands, diaspora communities, battlefields, memorials, visual archives, and personal chronicles—the volume demonstrates how practices of remembering, forgetting and commemorating are intrinsic to the region's ongoing identity formation. The folding of time, colonial with postcolonial, is repeatedly brought home in these contributions. This nuanced engagement with the international realm reveals how macro-politics and micro-histories are inextricably linked in South Asia's postcolonial experience.This volume will appeal to students and scholars across multiple fields, including International Relations, political science, history, South Asian studies, postcolonial studies, memory studies, and cultural studies. Researchers and policy analysts working on South Asia and interested in the intersection of identity politics, historical memory, and state formation will find the book's theoretical and historical framing of South Asian politics particularly valuable.The chapters in this book were originally published in India Review.