Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- About This Book -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- 1 Politics and Ecology in the Himalaya -- Introduction: Making States on Moving Mountains -- Political Ecology and International Relations in Dialogue -- Scientific Knowledge, Environmental Crisis and the Anthropocene -- Outline of the Book -- Bibliography -- 2 Bridging International Relations and Political Ecology -- Introduction: International Relations and Political Ecology -- How Does the Himalaya Look in IR? -- Political Ecology and Its International Entanglements -- Critical International Relations in Dialogue with Political Ecology -- Conclusion: An International Political Ecology Approach -- Bibliography -- 3 The Himalaya as an International Region -- Introduction: Surveying the Himalaya -- The Transformation of the Himalaya -- Organising Politics at High-Altitude -- State-making in the Himalaya -- The Contemporary Environment -- International Organisations and the Himalaya -- Languages and Diversity Across Borders in the Himalaya -- Conclusion: A New Himalayan Research Agenda for IR -- Bibliography -- 4 Militaries on Melting Ice: The Ladakh-Gilgit-Western Tibet Ice Caps -- Introduction: Ecological and Geopolitical Entanglements on Ice -- Environmental State-making in the Western Himalaya -- The 'Decolonization' of the Western Himalaya -- Siachen, Kargil, and the 2020 India-China conflict -- Cultural and Ecological Entanglements -- Dams and Power Generation -- Conclusion: Bordering High Altitudes -- Bibliography -- 5 Foothills, Forests and Fortresses: The Sikkim-Bhutan-Nepal Borderlands -- Introduction: The Sikkim-Nepal-Bhutan borderlands -- The Independent Lives of Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan -- Bhutan: Cultural Distinctiveness Between India and China -- Sikkim: Independence and Annexation -- Borders, Animals and More-than-human Ecologies.

The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya, by emphasising the entanglements between these two factors. Most international relations analyses of the Himalaya emphasize the central role of the region's states and their great power struggles. By reducing the region to its state actors, however, we miss the intense more-than-human diversity of the region, and the crucial role that the mountains play in the global environment. In doing so, the book makes a major contribution to international relations theory by drawing on insights from international political ecology. It first theorises international political ecology and examines the Himalaya as a global region, before moving looking at the international aspects of political ecology in the Himalaya through key areas of the mountains where international politics and ecology are deeply, inextricably linked. It presents three detailed case studies of different environmental and political issues in the Himalaya: icecaps (the India-China-Pakistan boundary dispute in the western Himalaya), foothills and forests (the Nepal-Bhutan-Sikkim borderlands), and rivers (the India-China Bangladesh dispute over the Brahmaputra River basin). Each case study draws on a mix of source materials including fieldwork, government sources, foreign policy discourse, Himalayan ethnographies, and environmental and ecological sciences scholarship. Alexander E. Davis is a lecturer in International Relations at The University of Western Australia. His research focuses on South Asia's foreign relations, from historical, postcolonial and environmental perspectives.

AbstractDisciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) in Australia have tended to start with the foundation of an IR chair at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1949. In this article, I trace the discipline's institutional history and traditions of thought from the formation of the Round Table in Australia in 1911, led by Lionel Curtis, through the establishment of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), and ending with the ANU story. I argue that Australian IR took as its starting assumption the idea of terra nullius (nobody's land), and the subsequent need to settle Australia. As a result, much of the discussion in the early study of 'IR' in Australia was framed around 'domestic' matters of settlement and colonisation. The focus of Australian IR radiated outwards from regional capitals, particularly to the tropical and desert regions of Australia with large Indigenous populations. At the margins of this were Australia's colonial possessions in the South Pacific. Finally, Australia's IR looked upon East Asia, motivated at least in part by fears of Asian peoples who might also seek to settle Australia. I conclude with a consideration of what Australian IR's historical entanglements with settler colonialism should mean for the discipline today.

This article challenges the validity of recent suggestions that shared history underpins India-Australia relations through an historical analysis of little-known diplomats who worked for the Indian High Commission in Australia and the Australian High Commission in India immediately after Indian independence. Based on largely unexplored archival material from India, Australia, and Canada, it argues that Australia's racialized identity, as expressed through the White Australia policy, thoroughly shaped Indian perceptions of Australia. While Indian policy makers never officially voiced their distaste for White Australia, Indian diplomats put their efforts into reshaping the image of India in Australia through travel and personal contacts as part of an effort to educate Australia about India. Likewise, Australia's colonial identity led it to see India and Indian foreign policy as "irrational" due to its emphasis on racial discrimination and decolonization. It is argued that, far from underpinning the relationship, colonial histories and subsequent postcolonial identities have played an important role in fracturing India-Australia relations. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

Australia's international relations (IR) discipline has a deep colonial history, but has never been through a conscious process of decolonisation. Although discussions of decolonising IR have taken place elsewhere, the discussion in Australia is in its infancy. This collection examines the possibilities for decolonising Australia's IR in the present moment, looking at its teaching practice, its research, its styles of analysis, and its relationship with Australian foreign policy. We consider what is particular to Australia's settler colonial context, what is achievable, and what is not. The collection also seeks to develop a new style of anti‐colonial foreign policy analysis in Australia, looking at the relationship between colonisation, settlement, and foreign policy. In this introduction, we first look over debates on decolonisation elsewhere in the field. We then examine the historical background of Australia's IR discipline, and look at Australian Indigenous diplomacy, to consider what is specific to Australia's context. We conclude by looking over the contributions of the papers in this collection, and consider what a decolonised Australian IR might look like. Ultimately, we argue that any process of decolonisation will be extremely difficult, and that decolonisation in Australian IR should be perceived as an ongoing struggle, rather than an endpoint in itself.

In October 2018, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi inaugurated a pet project, the "Statue of Unity", in Gujarat, India. The world's tallest statue, the Statue of Unity cost USD416.67 million to construct, and depicts India's first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as the "Iron Man of India", staring resolutely out over the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam. This article examines the meanings of the statue as a political project of memorialisation. We argue that the statue is an attempt to reimagine India's nationalist historiography around Patel, taking the emphasis off the secular, socialist first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In doing so, the statue constructs a hyper‐masculine idea of India centred on an assimilatory idea of "unity". The statue's construction materially enforced this symbolism by pushing aside the site's previous Adivasi owners, and presents an ordered, majoritarian, business‐led vision of public space in Modi's India. Within this space, the statue materialises Patel as the image of Indian identity. He is made from the stuff of progress, concrete and reinforced steel, and coated in bronze, which links his image with India's long history of religious statue‐making. The project then circulates these ideas through tourist marketing and visitor experience.