Oxford International Relations in South Asia – serie

Naval modernization is an extremely expensive, time-consuming, and a relativelyrare phenomenon. Scholars have proposed various arguments to explain thisprocess ranging from bureaucratic politics, to nationalism, and to the securitydilemma. The Nexus of Naval Modernization in India and China demonstratesthat from 1990 until 2020, the primary driver of naval modernization resultedfrom a strategic rivalry. Key to strategic rivalries is perceived threat perceptionsthat cause decision makers to prepare for worst-case scenarios when tryingto decipher their enemy's behaviour. When a state believes it is threatened bya rival's naval power it is likely to pursue its own form of naval modernization forself-protection. Importantly, rivalries do not exist in a vacuum and are frequentlylinked. This project will reveal how the interconnected nature of rivalries canalso cause naval modernization. Through a close examination of scholarly works,government documents, and in-depth focused interviews with experts based inIndia, China, Australia, and the U.S. Colley argues that while strategic rivalry isnot the only driver of naval modernization, it is the most compelling explanation.Other arguments are frequently embedded within the strategic rivalry modeland thus are best seen as only partial drivers. This study contributes to the rivalryresearch program as well as the policy and security studies literatures.

By mapping India's spatial imaginations underlying Indian foreign policy toward South Asia, Shibashis Chatterjee argues that India's understanding of its neighbourhood is informed by a politics of realism as South Asia remains a 'space' defined in terms of power and sovereign territoriality in contrast to alternative imaginations based on the market or community. This understanding is one of India's ruling elites consisting of politicians, cutting across party lines, key bureaucrats, army chiefs, and influential policy intellectuals. While alternative imagination/s of South Asia is indeed ideationally possible, the politics necessary to make this happen is virtually nonexistent. While India's relations with neighbours have varied with regimes over time, these have moved between fixed points of references, constituted by its imagination of South Asia as a space of power and territorial control. The book tells a story of India's spatial imaginations of its neighbourhood and reveals how the differentiated cartography of territorial nationalism still looms large on our shared ontology of social space.

India-Pakistan border in Jammu and Kashmir has witnessed repeated ceasefire violations over the past decade. Indeed, with the new low in the relations between India and Pakistan, ceasefire violations have gone up exponentially. These have the potential to not only begin a crisis but also escalate an ongoing crisis. To make things worse, in the event of major violations, political leadership on either side often engage in high-pitched rhetoric some of which even have nuclear undertones. Using fresh empirical data and oral history evidence, this book explains the causes of ceasefire violations on the Jammu and Kashmir border, and establishes a relationship between ceasefire violations and crisis escalation between India and Pakistan. In doing so, the book further nuances the existing arguments about the escalatory dynamics between the two South Asian nuclear rivals. Furthermore, the book explains ceasefire violations using the concept of 'autonomous military factors'.

This book strives to understand India's approach to global governance by way of systematically considering three potential factors - ideas, interests, and institutions - that have an impact on India's foreign policy-making on the global level. They examine possible explanations for India's varying compliance with global regimes and for its varying contributions to the development and change of those regimes in eight issue areas: non-proliferation, maritime security, counter-terrorism, cyber-governance, democracy promotion, climate change, trade policy, and development cooperation.

The end of the Cold War era marked a watershed in India's strategic history as it began to shift its strategic worldview from that of a relatively weak player with a defensive worldview to that of a more confident emerging power. The pros and cons of India's power potential have been debated at length in terms of its economic capacities, its expanding strategic horizons, and its internal strengths and weaknesses. But there has been relatively little detailed investigation of its military forces and the ways in which they have responded to the changing environment. This book aims to look closely at the modernization of the Indian armed forces and to ask: How have the Indian armed forces sought to mould themselves in response to the demands of an entirely new strategic setting? How do they view their roles in an increasingly complex world marked by a tightening web of interactions and its attendant frictions? Is the process of modernization under way in tune with the needs of the armed forces and the overall strategic approach of policy makers?

The importance of police forces in combating insurgencies is receiving increasing attention from policymakers and national leaders, but there is little academic work addressing the question of how police forces should be trained and deployed in such conflicts. This edited volume sets out to correct this imbalance through a series of case studies, drawn from Central, South, and Southeast Asia, as also Africa and the Middle East, which examine the circumstances under which police forces have failed to quell insurgencies-or even worsened internal security-as well as when they have proved themselves an essential part of the solution. Each case study covers the history of the insurgency, attempts to reform the police forces to confront it, and the success or failure of those attempts, concluding by presenting lessons learned for future counterinsurgent governments. Each chapter is written by a well-established scholar who has spent considerable time in the country under study.

The rise of China and India is undoubtedly a major feature of global politics nowadays. The interactions between the two rising Asian powers will not only exert a profound and far-reaching influence over regional security, but is also seen as a decisive factor in reshaping international order. Acknowledging that recurrent tensions seem to be a significant feature of Sino-Indian relations, people may ask: Why are China and India not able to develop long-term stable and friendly relations? To shed lights on the important relationship, this book provides a new perspective for understanding India-China relations by highlighting the asymmetry of the threat perceptions between India and China. The major issues of India-China relations, including the nuclear issue, the boundary problem, the Tibet issue, regional competition and cooperation, and India-China relations in the global context, are further examined taking an analytical approach. The book observes that India-China relations are constrained by the asymmetry between their threat perceptions, which has been a destabilizing factor in India-China relations.