Miller Co-Edits Special Issue of International Affairs
Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, co-
edited a special issue of International Affairs, the flagship journal of Chatham House, to mark the 70th anniversary of India’s independence after two centuries of British colonial rule.
The issue is the outcome of a collaboration between the University of Oxford and Boston University spearheaded by Miller and Dr. Kate Sullivan de Estrada. The collaboration began in 2015 with conferences at both Oxford and Boston University.
The issue, entitled India’s Rise at 70, was published on January 6, 2017, and was marked by launch events at Oxford and Chatham House in London on January 12, 2017 and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies on January 13, 2017.
Miller’s contribution to the issue, written with Sullivan de Estrada, is entitled “Pragmatism in Indian Foreign Policy: How Ideas Constrain Modi.”
From the text of the article:
The discourse on pragmatism in Indian foreign policy—consistent with the post-Cold War scholarship and most evident in sections of India’s print media—has experienced a resurgence since the assumption of the premiership by Narendra Modi in May 2014. Modi’s election was heralded as a seminal moment for India’s foreign policy. As one commentator pronounced: ‘There is little question that Modi’s foreign policy constitutes a departure from India’s stances of the past. These predictions of change have been based on hopes and alleged signs that Modi’s approach to foreign policy-making will be even more pragmatic than that of previous leaders. Not only, it is said, will he bypass the long-held idealistic notions of Nehruvianism, he will also set aside cultural and religious ideologies or entrenched principles, specifically, his own party’s Hindutva or Hindu nationalist ideology.
In this article, we engage critically with the scholarly work that identifies a shift to pragmatism in India’s foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and problematize the claims that Modi is a pragmatic leader who is able to dispense with earlier ideas and ideologies in foreign policy-making. Not only have a number of commentators already offered empirical evidence to counter claims that Modi can readily escape the constraints of India’s foreign policy ideas, discourses and processes, but, as we show in this article, the characterization of India’s post-Cold War foreign policies as ‘pragmatic’ stands in contrast to much of the theoretical scholarship on the role of ideas in transforming foreign policy, which emphasizes the constraints posed by institutionalized discourse and praxis.
You can read the entire article here.
The special issue was reviewed by The Diplomat on January 10, 2017, with the publication noting that the issue marks the first “time that Indian foreign policy has been the central focus of an English-language IR journal edited in ‘the West.’” You can read the entire review here.
Manjari Chatterjee Miller works on foreign policy and security issues in international relations with a focus on South and East Asia. She specializes in the foreign policy of rising powers India and China. Her book, Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China, argues that the bitter history of colonialism affects the foreign policy behavior of India and China even today. She is interested in ideational influences on foreign policy and conceptions of state security. She is currently working on rising powers and the domestic ideational frameworks that explain their changing status. You can learn more about her here.