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"This book examines in detail the strategic relevance of the Arthashastra. Attributed to the fourth century BCE, this classical treatise on state and statecraft rests at the intersection of political theory and international relations. Adopting a hermeneutic approach, the book discusses certain homologies related to concepts such as power, order, and morality. Underlining the conceptual value of the Arthashastra and classical texts such as Hitopdesha and Pancatantra, this volume highlights the non-western perspectives related to diplomacy and statecraft. It shows how a comparative analysis of these texts reveal a continuity rather than a change in the styles, tactics and political strategies. The book also showcases the value these ancient texts can bring to the study of contemporary international relations and political theory. This volume will be of interest to students, scholars and teachers of political studies, Indian political thought, and philosophy, South Asian studies, political theory and international relations"--

Since the mid-twentieth century, the extraction and consumption of mineral aggregates (i.e., sand and gravel) has grown at a higher rate and on a larger scale than any other resource group, making it the largest mineral resource currently consumed globally. Although reliable data for extraction of mineral aggregates (referred to as sand extraction) are lacking, estimates suggest that current annual extraction is as high as 40 Gt. This has important social and ecological ramifications. The industry overall is also plagued by rampant illegality, a strong black market, and intense violence, and results in the generation of severe social and environmental injustices. Yet despite the wide-ranging impacts of sand mining, there continues to be an acute shortage of research on its extraction, impacts, and solutions for future resource governance. This article draws on the political ecology literature, utilizing the concept of the commodity frontier and the theoretical framework of extractivism whilst engaging with academic as well as non-academic, grassroots literature around sand mining, to introduce the concept of "sand frontiers". Using the sand frontier as an analytical tool, four central questions are addressed, namely: 1) What are the drivers of expansion and intensification of sand frontiers? 2) What and where are the current and potential sand frontiers? 3) How is the forward movement of sand frontiers occurring? and 4) What are the identifiable socio-ecological transformations at these frontiers? In addressing these questions, the paper bridges research gaps around solutions to unsustainable sand extraction, using the lens of post-extractivism (PE) whilst continuing to put people living at sand frontiers at the centre of proposed solutions.

Climate change, increasingly being called the climate crisis, is arguably the greatest threat to human life as we know it. Across regions in the world, people are experiencing the most adverse impacts of this crisis in the form of more frequent and more intense climate extremes like heatwaves, droughts, floods, landslides, cyclones, wildfires, crop loss and water scarcity, among others. As per latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data, the crisis is only going to intensify in the coming decades making populations even more vulnerable to climate extremes and causing large scale disruption of natural and human systems. Thus, the ongoing climate crisis will threaten human security, and by extension, global security like never before, exacerbating ongoing conflicts through an explosive interplay between pre-existing fault lines in societies. This article tries to situate climate change in the current global security discourse through an analysis of the relationship between climate and conflict. It also attempts a reappraisal of traditional security discourse, particularly in developing countries like India, which are facing some of the worst modern-day impacts of extreme climate events. The article concludes that the global security discourse, policies, and as well as interventions to tackle armed conflicts need to be restructured to accommodate for the effect of climate change on conflicts.

This paper examines the politics of scale in the commemorative work undertaken by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), a coalition of social movement organisations (SMOs) seeking justice for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. The argument traces how the ICJB attempted to contest the localisation of the disaster by the Indian state and the transnational corporations involved. I outline how the disaster, which had been scaled down from an extraordinary global event to a private non-issue, was re-scaled successfully across multiple scales of meaning and regulation through ICJB's mobilisation of the frame of 'second/ongoing poisoning'. This contestation over the scaling of the disaster crucially involved multiple processes of memory-work. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reveals how the remembrance of the disaster functioned as a key site of the discursive and performative re-framings required to reinstate multi-scalar accountability for the disaster. Overall, the paper establishes the utility of the politics of scale approach in mapping the dynamics of the transnational mobilisations of memory by SMOs in pursuit of justice.

Going beyond the binaries of Western and non-Western, this article lays out a conceptual–analytical frame for understanding 'order' in international relations (IR). What does 'order' mean? What are its key characteristics? How is the conventional 'Western' understanding different from or similar to the understanding advanced in Arthashastra? These are some questions that this article seeks to address. The article picks up the discussion on English School of IR, juxtaposing it with Kautilya's Arthashastra. The indicators chosen for this more revisionist interpretation of the text are 'operative principles', 'code of conduct' and 'structures'. It is argued that the Kautilyan concept of order is broadly normative whereby norms were stipulated by the dharmashastras. Thus, underlining the distinct cultural and contextual undertones, the article emphasises that the normative underpinnings of 'order' in Arthashastra have to be read within the existing philosophical frames of the Hindu tradition. The cognitive–cultural frame of understanding orders perhaps best suits the purpose.