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AbstractGlobalization heralded the world economy in the 1980s, even though its policy prescriptions were laid out more broadly by neoliberal theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. Globalization endorsed the neoliberal policies of free trade and the free market economy as a counter‐narrative to the growing resurgence of the models of "social democracy" in the post‐Second World War period. This article seeks to unravel the inequalities and inequities brought in by the policies of globalization through the prisms of the Indian experience. Through a thorough analysis of the human development index (HDI) indicators, we can only agree with dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein that globalization has accentuated the miseries and underdevelopment of a developing country like India. It has exacerbated the class differences between the rich and the poor and deepened poverty, inequality, and unemployment in India.

Security discourse has radically changed over the years, especially since the Post–Cold War period. The traditional concept focuses on state security and national security, and is essentially based on realist and neo‐realist paradigms. However, in 1994, the United Nations Human Development Report for the first time elaborated the notion of human security and the associated Human Development Index (HDI). Human security advocates a people‐centric approach to security. The two foundational principles on which human security is based are "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want." I evaluate the notions of state security versus human security and examine how South Asian countries have fared regarding the human security indices. I conclude that, despite advances in some areas, various HDI parameters show that the human security record is still rather dismal in South Asia. There remains a critical need to improve it.

Conflict, peace and security are some of the enduring concerns of the Peace Research Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. They have become integrated in the dominant disciplines of international relations and political science and now are also part of most of the social science disciplines, such as economics, sociology, public policy, gender studies, international law and so on. This article purportedly seeks to examine some of the varied issues of conflict, peace and security and the challenges posed before the IR theorists to deal with them. It will also examine how the liberals, realists, Marxists, neo-Marxists and functionalists interpret conflict-transformation, peace-building and security. This article concludes with the argument that it is within the frontiers of critical theory as well as a class analysis of the structure of society within any state that social scientists can move from a paradigm of conflict reduction towards a more egalitarian model of peace and security. This article also concludes that only human security with a strong social welfare policy will lead to an egalitarian social order, especially in India.

Ideas of freedom have been an integral part of the discourses on nationalism and national movements in most of the post-colonial societies, including especially India. These ideas of freedom and anti-colonial movement in India can be looked at from diverse perspectives—it may be liberal, Marxist, neo-Marxist, revolutionaries and even pacifists like Gandhi. This article makes a modest attempt to understand Rajni Kothari's ideas of freedom, essentially through the prisms of his critical reflections and intervention on state, democracy, development and 'new' social or grass-roots movements. Kothari argued that freedom meant both 'autonomy of man' as well as 'autonomy of states'. Embedded in Kothari's ideas of freedom was the idea of a strong, deep and decentralized democratic structure, politics as a form of social transformation and rather an indigenous, autonomous, self-reliant and an 'alternative' model of economic development. However, contemporary India represents and reflects none of these ideas of freedom, whether it will be individual freedom or community freedom. With the decline of the welfare state as an agency pursuing socio-economic development, Kothari invents a 'new' idea of freedom as articulated by the grass-roots or 'new' social movements, which are essentially 'non-class', 'non-materialistic', 'humanist' and 'universalist' in their outlook and approach.