Publics, Institutions, and Cultures: New Research on Indian Foreign Policy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

India is increasingly a source of valuable empirical knowledge for theory-building and theory-testing efforts in foreign policy analysis, and international relations writ large. In recent years, scholars have used evidence from India to generate new insights on the organizational dynamics of insurgencies, strategies of nuclear proliferation and deployment, the impact of colonial victimhood on foreign policy, and the impact of state-society relations on military effectiveness. In keeping with this trend, the papers on this panel offer new evidence from India in an effort to enrich scholarly debates in the study of foreign policy surrounding the functioning of democratic institutions, bureaucracy, strategic culture, and counterinsurgency.

The paper by Staniland, Narang, and Milliff makes a novel contribution by systematically analyzing public opinion surveys on foreign policy in India from the 1960s to the present. Not only do the authors find variation across issue areas and region, but also by socio-economic status. The latter finding in particular compels us to rethink the societal basis of democratic foreign policymaking in a low-income and low-information environment.

The paper by Ahuja and Farfan-Mendez shows that the public is by no means an innocent bystander when it comes to internal security. The authors focus on the role that families of insurgents play in enabling the success of insurgencies on the one hand, and as a source of vulnerability for insurgents on the other. Counterinsurgency thus becomes a strategic interaction involving the state, insurgents, and the latter’s families.

Sinha’s paper looks at bureaucratic actors in the foreign policy process, who are often but not always insulated from public pressures. She examines the extraordinary rapprochement between the US and India since the end of the Cold War and argues that contrary to existing explanations that privilege geopolitics and personalities, there is a great deal to be learned in the US-India case about the ability of bureaucratic politics to shape unprecedented foreign policy outcomes.

Finally, the paper by Miller and Mukherjee examines the frameworks that the Indian military has historically used to think about strategy and the use of force. Starting in the colonial period, they examine the manner in which strategic thought among Indian military officers—expressed in a flagship military journal published from 1871 to the present—has evolved over time, thus illuminating the manner in which a strategic culture is formed and evolves over time.

All of the papers in this panel contribute new empirical knowledge on India’s foreign and security policies, and new theoretical insights to established bodies of research in international relations—on public opinion, counterinsurgency, bureaucratic politics, and strategic culture respectively. As India continues its rise in global affairs and begins to attract greater attention in political science scholarship, the researchers on this panel are at the forefront of new and innovative scholarship on the world’s largest democracy and what it has to offer to our collective understandings of international politics and foreign policy.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 20: Foreign Policy

Individual Presentations

• Uneven Accountability: Public Attitudes on Indian Foreign Policy since the 1960s - Paul Staniland, University of Chicago; Vipin Narang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Aidan Milliff, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Follow the Family: Kin Targeting in Counterinsurgencies - Amit Ahuja, University of California, Santa Barbara; Cecilia Farfan Mendez, University of California, San Diego

• Understanding the Foreign Policy Process Through the Lens of US-India Relations - Aseema Sinha, Claremont Mckenna College

• The Historical Origins of India’s Military Strategic Culture - Manjari Chatterjee Miller, Boston University; Rohan Mukherjee, Yale-NUS College

Chair

• Devesh Kapur Johns Hopkins SAIS

Discussant

• Karthika Sasikumar