Asian Studies Centre

Unlike ever before in India’s history, domestic political calculations and audience costs dictate the shaping of the country’s foreign and security policy. Under the Bharatiya Janata Party government, key foreign and security policy pursuits are often not undertaken for their own sake, but to cater to domestic electoral outcomes and spin convenient political narratives. The events that followed the 2019 Pulwama terror attack in Kashmir showed how the BJP-led government adopted an aggressive posture towards Pakistan in tandem with a carefully choreographed domestic political narrative to suit its forthcoming election campaign. However, the recent Sino-Indian military standoff on the LAC tells a completely different story. The BJP-led government refused to acknowledge the extent of incursions made by the Chinese army on the Sino-Indian border given how such an acknowledgement would have been politically costly for the ruling party. The talk will highlight how the party leveraged populism, social media, post-truth politics and narratives on nationalism and patriotism in order to legitimise its use of foreign policy outcomes for domestic political gains. The talk will also discuss how the BJP has managed to avoid domestic audience costs while making risky foreign policy decisions.

Conjunctures and crises reveal the fault lines of a society. Covid 19 and the resultant lockdown in India have brought back memories of the devastation wrought by the flu epidemic of 1918 and the political crackdown by the colonial government. There has been a great abandonment of labour and the poor by the present government as much as an emerging compact between state and capital to restructure industrial relations to kickstart production once the lockdown is over. This moment gives us an occasion to reflect on the hardening contours of politics and society.

Professor Gregory Gause (Head of International Affairs Department, The Bush School of Government and Public Service) gives a talk on Saudi Arabia crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Introduced by Dr Toby Matthiesen (St. Antony's College, Oxford. Since his father King Salman assumed the throne in 2015, his son Prince Muhammad bin Salman has been the driving force behind Saudi domestic and foreign policy, since 2017 as crown prince. While it is incontestable that the young prince has made substantial changes in the kingdom, just how significant and lasting will they be? This talk will explore this question in four areas: economic policy, social policy, regional foreign policy and the politics of the ruling family.

F. Gregory Gause, III is Professor and John H. Lindsey '44 Chair of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A and M University, as well as serving as head of School's Department of International Affairs and as an affiliate faculty member of the School's Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. He was previously on the faculties of the University of Vermont (1995-2014) and Columbia University (1987-1995) and was Fellow for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1993-1994). During the 2009-10 academic year he was Kuwait Foundation Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In spring 2009 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the American University in Kuwait. In spring 2010 he was a research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Islamic Studies and Research in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. From 2012 to 2015 he was a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.

His research focuses on the international politics of the Middle East, particularly the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, and American foreign policy toward the region. He has published three books, most recently The International Relations of the Persian Gulf (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, Security Studies, Journal of Democracy, Washington Quarterly, National Interest, and in other journals and edited volumes. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1987 and his B.A. (summa cum laude) from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia in 1980. He studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo (1982-83) and Middlebury College (1984).

Book reading and Discussion with Gurmehar Kaur

Disscussion on the Political Crisis in Sri Lanka

Public lecture by Professor Gyan Prakash (Princeton University) from 31 October 2018

Alenka Zupancic's lecture on 'Love thy neighbour as theyself' from 6 November 2018 Reference to Christianity and to Christian tradition is one of the key ingredients of the expanding right-wing identity politics in Europe (and more largely, in the West), including its more or less explicit nationalism and racism. The commandment to love your Neighbour as yourself obviously presents this politics with a problem and necessitates a (re)interpretation of its meaning. This lecture looks into some examples of this interpretational work, and into how it affects the figure of the Neighbour. At the same time, it will interrogate reasons for which Freud has found this commandment to be at the very core of what he called "discontent" (Unbehagen) in our "civilisation" (Kultur). What is this aggressiveness that tends to emerge together with the figure of the Neighbour, as inseparable from it? To answer this question, the lecture takes recourse to the (Lacanian) psychoanalysis – not in order to steer away from the political dimension of the question, but on the contrary to help us work our way back to its political dimension.

Ryan Wolfson-Ford speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.

Thahir Jamal Kiliyamannil and Manasi Mohanan Sushama speak at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.

Pradeep Sangapala and Nihal Perera speak at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' workshop 28 January 2018.