Vineet Thakur
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3612304 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vineet Thakur |
| NOMBRES | Vineet |
| APELLIDO | Thakur |
| FIRMA | THAKUR V |
| AFILIACIONES | Leiden University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9273-579X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2012 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
The Caste of Diplomacy
What does caste have to do with diplomacy? This special issue is an effort to guide discussions more systematically in thinking through the relationship between caste and diplomacy and, more specifically, Indian diplomacy. Accordingly, this introductory article lays out the reasons for interrogating Indian diplomacy through the prism of caste and reveals the ways in which diplomacy as a site has remained an exclusively upper caste space. In an ef…
Civilisation-Washing
This article analyses Indian diplomacy at the 2023 G20 Summit, which India hosted. It uses a Critical Caste Studies approach to foreground the role of caste in Indian diplomacy, focussing on four prominent discursive tropes at the Summit – the naming of India as Bharat, the promotion of a ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, Sabka Praya’ associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s philosophy of Integral Humanism, the philosophy of Vas…
How a Nazi occupied India’s first chair in International Relations
This article contributes to disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) by revealing a little-known history: how a Nazi diplomat, Curt Max Prüfer, occupied the first chair in IR in India. While the paper documents how Prüfer, a discredited diplomat, landed in Delhi through his connections with peripatetic Indian anti-colonial networks and spent slightly over two years as the first IR chair at Delhi University, it also makes broader cla…
Confronting the Challenges to Multilateralism in Times of Crises
Brahmins and Balance of Power
In this article, I revisit a modern classic, a book that is often cited but rarely analyzed: A.P. Rana's Imperatives of Non-Alignment. Appearing in 1976, the book was a culmination of decade-long work and claimed to be the first attempt at IR theory from India. Rana was indeed from the first generation of scholars who engaged deeply with International Relation (IR) theory, and the book drew on a range of, sometimes contradictory, theoretical pers…
Casting and Casteing Indian Diplomacy
In this essay, I look at a curious intersection – the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the interwar era and the end of indentured labor. A genealogical reading suggests that Indian diplomacy takes “birth” primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of the new, seemingly upper caste Indian, in contrast to the lower caste “coolie” of the past. Diplomacy here becomes a practice through which this difference between the upper caste Indian …
On dreamworlds, declinism and difference
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
The Guicciardini Prize Forum
The Guicciardini Prize Forum: reply to comments." Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 34(6), pp. 895–896
South Africa, race and the emergence of international relations
This ambitious book engages from an historical angle in a critical exploration of IR discourse. It focuses in particular on the apparently concealed or marginalised position of race in IR theory, a
Travels in Diplomacy
In April 1921, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was appointed as India’s representative to the Imperial Conference in London. His secretary was a young Indian Civil Service officer, G.S. Bajpai. Over the course of the next two years, the two Indians travelled together as India’s diplomatic representatives to London, Geneva, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The young Bajpai and his ‘chief’ developed a loving bond that was to remain strong for t…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Disciplinary histories are, by default, complicit in the production of subjective memories as truth. This Special Issue builds on the existing scholarship on rethinking IR's disciplinary history by expanding its geographical focus beyond the West, and explores how IR came to define itself as a self-contained body of knowledge that is distinct from other fields of study in different parts of the world. These alternative histories enable us to appr…
South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations
This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations. Conventional, western histories of the discipline point to 1919 as the year of the ‘birth of the discipline’ with two seminal initiatives – setting up of the first Chair of IR at Aberystwyth and the founding of the Institute of International Relations on the side-lines of the Paris Peace Conference. From these events, International Relatio…
A pragmatic methodology for studying international practices
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in international politics…
An Asian Drama
The Asian Relations Conference has long served as a historical footnote to the more famous Bandung Conference of 1955. In this paper, however, I argue that this Conference needs to be read and analysed independently. As the opening act of decolonial solidarity, this Conference juxtaposes the moment and the movement of decolonisation, alerting us to the promises and pitfalls of both. In particular one needs to be conscious of its Eurocentric readi…
The “hardy annual”
This article traces the history of India’s first resolution at the United Nations (UN). Introduced in 1946, “Treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa” became an annual item on the UN agenda until 1962 when it was merged with another India-sponsored item on “apartheid.” For seventeen years, in a fast polarizing world, Indian diplomats used this item to strategically galvanize global opinion against racism. Against all odds, Indian represe…
An act of faith’ or a new ‘Brown Empire’? The dismissal of India’s international anti-Racism, 1945–1961
At the inaugural UN session in 1946, an Indian-sponsored resolution was passed with a two-thirds majority against South Africa’s racist treatment of Indians. India continued its activism over racism and apartheid throughout the 1950s, though the issue was increasingly seen as a painful yearly ritual. Still, Indian diplomats persisted in raising the issue every year, despite diminishing results. The British settler-colonies were particularly offen…
Liberal, Liminal and Lost
Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness…
Imperial Mission, ‘Scientific’ Method
This article offers an alternative account of the origins of academic IR to the conventional Aberystwyth-centred one. Informed by a close reading of the archive, our narrative proposes that the ideas and method of what was to become IR were first developed in South Africa. Here, we suggest how the creation of a racially-ordered state served as a template for the British Commonwealth and later the World State. We draw further on the British domini…
A Communal Affair over International Affairs
This paper makes an archival journey into the making of institutes of international affairs in late colonial India. By exploring the intertwined lives of two such institutions, it unearths an ideational fight over the study of international affairs in India between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), established in 1936, and the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), started in 1943. From the outset, the IIIA was strongly pro-g…
Reflections on dead theory in International Relations
In this short autobiographical essay, I trace my journey in the discipline of International Relations. While entering the discipline, I, along with a host of my classmates, were enamoured by the exciting possibilities of thinking theoretically. Almost a decade later, those promises look bleak. From the perspective of a student in the discipline, I discuss why this may be so
Walking the Thin Line
Historians of India's foreign policy have often failed to see beyond the ‘Great man’ Jawaharlal Nehru. This Nehru-centric vision is not only misleading, but also unfair to Nehru. Here, we seek to take the gaze off Nehru and New Delhi so as to view Indian foreign policy from different locations. We examine the ways in which India's diplomats in Australia, Canada, and South Africa resisted racial discrimination. India's anti-racist diplomacy has mo…
Foreign Policy and its People
Just as apartheid was ending, South Africa’s foreign relations witnessed a massive expansion. However, the Department of Foreign Affairs that was to manage this change found itself undergoing institutional transformations of both personnel and ideology. Studies on South African foreign policy have mostly neglected this transformation, which has had a considerable influence on the content and direction of South African foreign policy. In discussin…
Out in the dark
Benjamin Cohen's disciplinary history of international political economy (IPE) begins with the premise that Africa has had little to contribute to this global discipline. Differing from this view, we argue that disciplinary histories such as Cohen's elide the relationship between the discipline and its field. It is only through the juxtaposition of knowledge, power and politics that we can arrive at a fuller historical understanding of theinterna…
Africa and the Theoretical Peace in IR
This article responds to the debate on “The End of IR Theory?” that appeared in a recent volume of the European Journal of International Relations. It argues that the pronouncements about “theoretical peace” carry the subtext of “epistemic violence,” foreclosing the debate and the possibility of theoretic interventions emerging from the non-West—in this case, Africa. Elucidating how IR theory (IRT) has remained a parochial enterprise by the delib…
Imperial Mission, ‘Scientific’ Method
This article offers an alternative account of the origins of academic IR to the conventional Aberystwyth-centred one. Informed by a close reading of the archive, our narrative proposes that the ideas and method of what was to become IR were first developed in South Africa. Here, we suggest how the creation of a racially-ordered state served as a template for the British Commonwealth and later the World State. We draw further on the British domini…
An Asian Drama
The Asian Relations Conference has long served as a historical footnote to the more famous Bandung Conference of 1955. In this paper, however, I argue that this Conference needs to be read and analysed independently. As the opening act of decolonial solidarity, this Conference juxtaposes the moment and the movement of decolonisation, alerting us to the promises and pitfalls of both. In particular one needs to be conscious of its Eurocentric readi…
Liberal, Liminal and Lost
Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness…
Walking the Thin Line
Historians of India's foreign policy have often failed to see beyond the ‘Great man’ Jawaharlal Nehru. This Nehru-centric vision is not only misleading, but also unfair to Nehru. Here, we seek to take the gaze off Nehru and New Delhi so as to view Indian foreign policy from different locations. We examine the ways in which India's diplomats in Australia, Canada, and South Africa resisted racial discrimination. India's anti-racist diplomacy has mo…
Africa and the Theoretical Peace in IR
This article responds to the debate on “The End of IR Theory?” that appeared in a recent volume of the European Journal of International Relations. It argues that the pronouncements about “theoretical peace” carry the subtext of “epistemic violence,” foreclosing the debate and the possibility of theoretic interventions emerging from the non-West—in this case, Africa. Elucidating how IR theory (IRT) has remained a parochial enterprise by the delib…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Disciplinary histories are, by default, complicit in the production of subjective memories as truth. This Special Issue builds on the existing scholarship on rethinking IR's disciplinary history by expanding its geographical focus beyond the West, and explores how IR came to define itself as a self-contained body of knowledge that is distinct from other fields of study in different parts of the world. These alternative histories enable us to appr…
A pragmatic methodology for studying international practices
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in international politics…
The “hardy annual”
This article traces the history of India’s first resolution at the United Nations (UN). Introduced in 1946, “Treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa” became an annual item on the UN agenda until 1962 when it was merged with another India-sponsored item on “apartheid.” For seventeen years, in a fast polarizing world, Indian diplomats used this item to strategically galvanize global opinion against racism. Against all odds, Indian represe…
A Communal Affair over International Affairs
This paper makes an archival journey into the making of institutes of international affairs in late colonial India. By exploring the intertwined lives of two such institutions, it unearths an ideational fight over the study of international affairs in India between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), established in 1936, and the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), started in 1943. From the outset, the IIIA was strongly pro-g…
Brahmins and Balance of Power
In this article, I revisit a modern classic, a book that is often cited but rarely analyzed: A.P. Rana's Imperatives of Non-Alignment. Appearing in 1976, the book was a culmination of decade-long work and claimed to be the first attempt at IR theory from India. Rana was indeed from the first generation of scholars who engaged deeply with International Relation (IR) theory, and the book drew on a range of, sometimes contradictory, theoretical pers…
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
Foreign Policy and its People
Just as apartheid was ending, South Africa’s foreign relations witnessed a massive expansion. However, the Department of Foreign Affairs that was to manage this change found itself undergoing institutional transformations of both personnel and ideology. Studies on South African foreign policy have mostly neglected this transformation, which has had a considerable influence on the content and direction of South African foreign policy. In discussin…
India’s Diplomatic Entrepreneurism
The article documents India’s involvement in the Korean crisis from 1950–1952. It argues that India’s ‘diplomatic entrepreneurism’ allowed it to become the interlocutor, mediator and adjudicator, all rolled into one, helping India to create a space of manoeuvre for itself in the fast polarizing international system. Jawaharlal Nehru expectedly is the main protagonist in this tale, yet it also seeks to bring forth contributions of other Indian dip…
South Asia and Africa After Independence
India’s Diplomatic Entrepreneurism
The article documents India’s involvement in the Korean crisis from 1950–1952. It argues that India’s ‘diplomatic entrepreneurism’ allowed it to become the interlocutor, mediator and adjudicator, all rolled into one, helping India to create a space of manoeuvre for itself in the fast polarizing international system. Jawaharlal Nehru expectedly is the main protagonist in this tale, yet it also seeks to bring forth contributions of other Indian dip…
Foreign Policy and its People
Just as apartheid was ending, South Africa’s foreign relations witnessed a massive expansion. However, the Department of Foreign Affairs that was to manage this change found itself undergoing institutional transformations of both personnel and ideology. Studies on South African foreign policy have mostly neglected this transformation, which has had a considerable influence on the content and direction of South African foreign policy. In discussin…
Out in the dark
Benjamin Cohen's disciplinary history of international political economy (IPE) begins with the premise that Africa has had little to contribute to this global discipline. Differing from this view, we argue that disciplinary histories such as Cohen's elide the relationship between the discipline and its field. It is only through the juxtaposition of knowledge, power and politics that we can arrive at a fuller historical understanding of theinterna…
Africa and the Theoretical Peace in IR
This article responds to the debate on “The End of IR Theory?” that appeared in a recent volume of the European Journal of International Relations. It argues that the pronouncements about “theoretical peace” carry the subtext of “epistemic violence,” foreclosing the debate and the possibility of theoretic interventions emerging from the non-West—in this case, Africa. Elucidating how IR theory (IRT) has remained a parochial enterprise by the delib…
Reflections on dead theory in International Relations
In this short autobiographical essay, I trace my journey in the discipline of International Relations. While entering the discipline, I, along with a host of my classmates, were enamoured by the exciting possibilities of thinking theoretically. Almost a decade later, those promises look bleak. From the perspective of a student in the discipline, I discuss why this may be so
Walking the Thin Line
Historians of India's foreign policy have often failed to see beyond the ‘Great man’ Jawaharlal Nehru. This Nehru-centric vision is not only misleading, but also unfair to Nehru. Here, we seek to take the gaze off Nehru and New Delhi so as to view Indian foreign policy from different locations. We examine the ways in which India's diplomats in Australia, Canada, and South Africa resisted racial discrimination. India's anti-racist diplomacy has mo…
The “hardy annual”
This article traces the history of India’s first resolution at the United Nations (UN). Introduced in 1946, “Treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa” became an annual item on the UN agenda until 1962 when it was merged with another India-sponsored item on “apartheid.” For seventeen years, in a fast polarizing world, Indian diplomats used this item to strategically galvanize global opinion against racism. Against all odds, Indian represe…
An act of faith’ or a new ‘Brown Empire’? The dismissal of India’s international anti-Racism, 1945–1961
At the inaugural UN session in 1946, an Indian-sponsored resolution was passed with a two-thirds majority against South Africa’s racist treatment of Indians. India continued its activism over racism and apartheid throughout the 1950s, though the issue was increasingly seen as a painful yearly ritual. Still, Indian diplomats persisted in raising the issue every year, despite diminishing results. The British settler-colonies were particularly offen…
Liberal, Liminal and Lost
Indian historiography has largely overlooked the contribution of Indian Liberals in the pre-independence era. It is worse in Indian diplomatic history where studies on pre-independence are few and far between. Responding to this double excision, this article traces the emergence of a new Indian narrative of foreign policy around the issues of equality and justice in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Anchoring their argumentativeness…
Imperial Mission, ‘Scientific’ Method
This article offers an alternative account of the origins of academic IR to the conventional Aberystwyth-centred one. Informed by a close reading of the archive, our narrative proposes that the ideas and method of what was to become IR were first developed in South Africa. Here, we suggest how the creation of a racially-ordered state served as a template for the British Commonwealth and later the World State. We draw further on the British domini…
A Communal Affair over International Affairs
This paper makes an archival journey into the making of institutes of international affairs in late colonial India. By exploring the intertwined lives of two such institutions, it unearths an ideational fight over the study of international affairs in India between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), established in 1936, and the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), started in 1943. From the outset, the IIIA was strongly pro-g…
An Asian Drama
The Asian Relations Conference has long served as a historical footnote to the more famous Bandung Conference of 1955. In this paper, however, I argue that this Conference needs to be read and analysed independently. As the opening act of decolonial solidarity, this Conference juxtaposes the moment and the movement of decolonisation, alerting us to the promises and pitfalls of both. In particular one needs to be conscious of its Eurocentric readi…
A pragmatic methodology for studying international practices
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in international politics…
South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations
This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations. Conventional, western histories of the discipline point to 1919 as the year of the ‘birth of the discipline’ with two seminal initiatives – setting up of the first Chair of IR at Aberystwyth and the founding of the Institute of International Relations on the side-lines of the Paris Peace Conference. From these events, International Relatio…
The Guicciardini Prize Forum
The Guicciardini Prize Forum: reply to comments." Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 34(6), pp. 895–896
South Africa, race and the emergence of international relations
This ambitious book engages from an historical angle in a critical exploration of IR discourse. It focuses in particular on the apparently concealed or marginalised position of race in IR theory, a
Travels in Diplomacy
In April 1921, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri was appointed as India’s representative to the Imperial Conference in London. His secretary was a young Indian Civil Service officer, G.S. Bajpai. Over the course of the next two years, the two Indians travelled together as India’s diplomatic representatives to London, Geneva, Washington, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The young Bajpai and his ‘chief’ developed a loving bond that was to remain strong for t…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Disciplinary histories are, by default, complicit in the production of subjective memories as truth. This Special Issue builds on the existing scholarship on rethinking IR's disciplinary history by expanding its geographical focus beyond the West, and explores how IR came to define itself as a self-contained body of knowledge that is distinct from other fields of study in different parts of the world. These alternative histories enable us to appr…
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
Casting and Casteing Indian Diplomacy
In this essay, I look at a curious intersection – the emergence of Indian diplomacy in the interwar era and the end of indentured labor. A genealogical reading suggests that Indian diplomacy takes “birth” primarily to articulate the political and civic rights of the new, seemingly upper caste Indian, in contrast to the lower caste “coolie” of the past. Diplomacy here becomes a practice through which this difference between the upper caste Indian …
On dreamworlds, declinism and difference
Confronting the Challenges to Multilateralism in Times of Crises
Brahmins and Balance of Power
In this article, I revisit a modern classic, a book that is often cited but rarely analyzed: A.P. Rana's Imperatives of Non-Alignment. Appearing in 1976, the book was a culmination of decade-long work and claimed to be the first attempt at IR theory from India. Rana was indeed from the first generation of scholars who engaged deeply with International Relation (IR) theory, and the book drew on a range of, sometimes contradictory, theoretical pers…
The Caste of Diplomacy
What does caste have to do with diplomacy? This special issue is an effort to guide discussions more systematically in thinking through the relationship between caste and diplomacy and, more specifically, Indian diplomacy. Accordingly, this introductory article lays out the reasons for interrogating Indian diplomacy through the prism of caste and reveals the ways in which diplomacy as a site has remained an exclusively upper caste space. In an ef…
Political science (24 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Politics (20 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · International relations (14 obras) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (10 obras) · History (8 obras) · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies (7 obras) · Gender Studies (7 obras)