Dr. Mohammad Aminul Karim on the geopolitical importance of Bay of Bengal in Indo-Pacific security with consortium member Mr. Rubaiyat Rahman.

Rushali Saha of the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers interviews Colonel Naresh Rastogi, Indian Army, retired. Topics include many security-related issues facing the Indo-Pacific and India's place therein. 

Commissioned in the Corps of Signals of the Indian Army in June 1957, he saw front-line action in the 1965 war, where the Pak Patton-Division was immobilized and destroyed. After fourteen years of service, he was transferred to Infantry, where, joining 8 Madras, he took active and leading part in the Bangladesh Operations in 1971, in Jessore-Khulna Sector.

Later, after the command of the Battalion, taking premature retirement, he had an eleven-year stint overseas.

Now, settled in Noida, a suburb of the National Capital, Delhi, and accompanied by his wife, he is fond of reading, writing and relaxing, especially with golf.

Consortium member Dr. Leo Lin interviews Dr. Simon Reich regarding European grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

Dr. Simon Reich has been a professor in the Division of Global Affairs and Department of Political Science at Rutgers’ Newark campus since 2008. He also holds an appointment as a Chercheur Associé at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po (Paris). He received his BA from the University of Essex, an MA from Brandeis University, and both an MA and a PhD from Cornell University. Prior to his arrival at Rutgers-Newark, he worked at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs for over two decades, including serving as the inaugural Director of the Ford Institute for Human Security. Reich has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. He also worked at the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in Washington DC and served as the Director of Research and Analysis at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. Reich has published 13 books. His more recent ones include Good-Bye Hegemony! with Richard Ned Lebow (Princeton 2015); The End of Grand Strategy with Peter Dombrowski (Cornell 2018); the co-edited Comparative Grand Strategy: A Framework and Cases (Oxford 2019); and his recently published Across Type, Time and Space: American Grand Strategy in Comparative Perspective with Peter Dombrowski (Cambridge 2021). His current projects include a new book on European strategies in dealing with China and the US. Reich has published in several major journals including International Affairs, International Organization and International Security. He also serves as co-editor (with Thierry Balzacq and Peter Dombrowski) of the ‘Oxford Studies in Grand Strategy.’ He has been appointed as the George Soros Visiting Distinguished Chair at the Central European University in Vienna from January to April 2022.

Consortium member Neil Law interviews Fabio Gomes dos Santos, a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, on the topic of Sino-Brazilian relations. 

Consortium researcher Vineet Malik interviews Dr. Alka Acharya, professor of Chinese studies in the Centre for East Asian Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Dr. Acharya has been teaching courses on Chinese foreign policy and political economy at the graduate level since 1993. She is also an honorary fellow of the Institute of Chinese Studies (New Delhi) and the Editor of China Report, a journal of East Asian affairs. She is the joint editor of the book Crossing a Bridge of Dreams: 50 years of India-China, published in 2002; has contributed chapters to many books; and regularly features in the Economic and Political Weekly, published from Mumbai, India. She has written widely on India-China relations and other aspects of China’s foreign policy. Her current research focuses on the settlement of the PRC’s territorial disputes, India-China-Russia trilateral cooperation, and the Chinese strategic response to the post-Cold War globalizing of politico-security architecture, with special reference to China’s neighborhood. She is a member of the India-China Eminent Persons Group and a member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India.

Moderator Anvesh Jain, a founding member of the Consortium and a law student at the University of Ottawa, interviews Dr. Ernest Gunasekara-Rockwell, director, and Dr. Indu Saxena, deputy director, who reflect upon the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers' first anniversary and the future of the organization.