International Politics
May 14, 2024 2025-02-27 10:13International Politics
International Politics
International Politics
At IDEAS, our hopes for International Politics (INP-IDEAS here onwards) are to facilitate a space where scholarship on IR maybe fostered, with a view to support critical, peripheral and innovative scholarship. The imagined goals for the cluster are fairly simple – to curate a space where leading conversations on IR may find room; to create room to include established as well as junior scholars to present and discuss their work; to promote teaching collaborations and discussions on pedagogy among IR teachers with a view to build collaborative learning spaces for our student community; to support scholarship and projects of the INP-IDEAS team by facilitating opportunities to network and collaborate with relevant scholars, wherever they may be located; finally, to encourage building a culture of research workshops and dialogic symposiums not just among faculty but also students at JGU.
Sub-verticals for INP-IDEAS
- Theory
- Regionalism & International Organisations
- Security, Intelligence and Strategy
- Global Governance & Multilateralism
- Methodology
- Global South Studies
- Queer and Gender Studies
- Popular Culture, Media & Visual IR
- Foreign Policy & Diplomacy
- Comparative Politics
- Actors in the International System
- Electoral Politics & Governance Processes
- Political Economy Approaches to IR
- Teaching and Pedagogy in IR
- Migration, Environment and Climate Change
- Historical IR
- Postcolonial, Decolonial and Non-Western IR
Constellation Lead
Dr. Devika Misra
JSIA
Constellation Fellows
Dr. Chisom Ubabukoh
JGLS
Gunjan Singh
JGLS
Jyot Shikhar Singh
Constellation Members
Pushpak Kumar Roy
Dr. Ariel González Levaggi
Dr. Maria L. Lagutina
Dr Rafael Bittencourt Rodrigues Lopes
Dr. Giovanni Barbieri
Dr José Augusto Ribas Miranda
Projects
1. “Writing Stories As/For/Against IR: Forgetting Theories, Undoing Epistemic/Bodily/Harmful) Practices, Retrieving Our Many Worlds”
How might writing stories help IR scholars to forget theories and undo (epistemic/bodily/harmful) practices that sustain interlocking systems of oppression in and beyond the IR classroom? Can writing stories retrieve many worlds of life and existence otherwise that IR scholars are already embedded in and help them to imagine less violent theories and practices? How might our stories disrupt the hegemony of understanding “the international” as separate from embodied knowledges experienced in, through, and across our many worlds? What can narrative and embodied methodologies offer to discussions on ethics and violence in both theory and practice within IR? This special issue explores those questions with IR scholars’ stories and embodied methodologies, as well as with forums of senior scholars who have done this work for more than two decades in the field. Building on an extensive legacy of special issues and books inviting IR scholars to write and not just analyze stories, autobiographies, autoethnographies, ethnographies, fictions, narratives, tales, and poems, this special issue cultivates new editing, reading, and writing opportunities for the study and practice of the international and its relations.
Collaborators: Devika Misra, Ambreen Agha, Julio César Díaz Calderón
2. Putting Solidarity Projects in Context: Analyzing Cohesion in Pandemic Policies in CELAC and SAARC
There is no dearth of cases to be evaluated when comparisons of regionalisms in South Asia and Latin America are conceptualized. However, while the overarching flagship regional organisation of South Asia, namely the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has often suffered severe stalemates due to regional tensions, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations, has presented itself on the opposite spectrum of active, if at times ineffectual, declaratory regionalism. Where regional integration in Latin America is both policy and project (Tussie 2009), in South Asia, regional rivalries, international interference and fraught identity driven nationalisms have precluded discussions of cohesion, even in the face of conjoined histories. The presence of rival regional powers, starkly in the case of South Asia and more obliquely in Latin America has enabled interesting solidarity patterns to emerge in the regional formations. Yet, SAARC and CELAC both continue to exist, both are evoked in times of crisis and both continue to represent different versions of regional solidarities that are enunciated variously by these regional rivals where different trajectories of development and different political ideologies have acted as intervening variables.
The context of the pandemic only served to exacerbate the need for neighbourly support systems in an increasingly introverted international system which had been marked by rising protectionism and hypernationalism. This paper attempts to understand how these regional solidarity projects fared by evaluating the pandemic regional policies of two regional powers in the regions, namely India and Brazil in the regional institutions of SAARC and CELAC. Both countries have made claims for not just regional leadership but also leadership at the international stage. Both, have had these claims contested by other regional powers in their respective regions. Both have been governed by increasingly nationalist regimes and both countries have suffered gravely under the pandemic. However, while the Modi-government in India has eked out its own internationalist path towards supporting multilateralism, the Bolsonaro government in its policy of negation of the pandemic, has increasingly introverted itself from the region. What are the ways in which the region was utilized by these countries to forge domestic policies of legitimacy? In what ways did their individual behavior stack against the existence of these two all-encompassing regional organisations? What are the hopes for regional solidarity post-pandemic in South Asia and Latin America?
This paper aims to unearth nuances of pandemic behaviour of these two regional giants by firstly, evaluating the histories of regional solidarity in South Asia and Latin America. Secondly, it hopes to situate regional cooperation projects in both regions in context through an evaluation of SAARC and CELAC. Finally, it hopes to disentangle the vagaries of pandemic support and containment policies by these two regional giants with their regional partners.
Collaborator: Devika Misra
3. Performative Right-Wing Populism and Cultural Studies
This paper examines the significance of populism as a performative and culturally constructed phenomenon, highlighting its ability to reconfigure social identities and power relations through discursive tools. By theorizing populism as a “floating signifier” shaped by cultural anxieties and historical contingencies, it offers a critical framework to understand how populism challenges existing paradigms in political and cultural studies. This analysis advances the discourse on populism by bridging cultural studies and political theory, providing new insights into its enduring impact on contemporary political culture and its implications for identity formation and power dynamics
Keywords: Populism, Performative Politics, Cultural Studies, Identity Formation, Discursive Analysis
Collaborator: Jyot Shikhar
