Alexander E Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 3870724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander E Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander E |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS A E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Adelaide |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7277-8407 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1912 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
‘From K2 to Kanyakumari, Bharat is One’
One of the first things travelers to the Indian Himalaya remark upon are the curious, often rhyming and comedic, road signs of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) dotting the strategic roads of the region. In this article, I ask what role road signs play in physically narrating, constructing and altering the imagination of the contested high-altitude region of Ladakh. I provide a combined discursive and visual analysis of military-origin road sig…
The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains
The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya. It does so by focusing on the entanglements between ecology and international politics in the Himalaya. 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, …
Decolonising Australia's International Relations? A Critical Introduction
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 relationsh…
Bordering Ladakh, Again
In August 2019, the Indian government dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir, designating its Northern region as the Union Territory of Ladakh. Two months later, it released a new Political Map of India on which Ladakh was drawn as one of India’s largest territories. Like most representations of territory on political maps, the claims made were simplified. India’s rendering did not acknowledge that Pakistan and China administered much of Ladakh…
Geopolitics of Melting Mountains
Bordering the postcolonial state
In 1975, two small territories with distinct identities were incorporated within larger postcolonial states: in April, the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim became a state within the Republic of India, while in December, the Republic of Indonesia annexed Portuguese (East) Timor. From 1975 to 1982, India voted against all United Nations General Assembly resolutions supporting East Timor's self-determination. While Western states' support is well documen…
Making a settler colonial IR
Disciplinary 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 wit…
Constructing an “Iron” Unity
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 projec…
International relations and the Himalaya
This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a…
A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964
This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplo…
Empire and Asian Migration
Solidarity or hierarchy
The idea of solidarity between India and Africa has long drawn heavily from historical sources, including the anti-colonial legacies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, and ongoing frustration
Comrades against imperialism
Comrades against imperialism: Nehru, India and interwar internationalism, by Michele L. Louro." Asian Studies Review, 43(2), pp. 353–354
Resignifying ‘responsibility
Postcolonial scholarship on nuclear weapons has demonstrated that mainstream literature perpetuates a set of orientalist discourses about 'Enlightenment' and 'civilization' which legitimizes global hierarchies. What has been less studied is the role of non-Western countries in challenging or perpetuating these discourses. This article focuses on the discourse of 'nuclear responsibility' as it has been deployed by Indian official to challenge West…
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…
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…
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…
Australian foreign policy and news media
This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as 'rising' superpowers whose prominence offered…
Myanmar and India
Since the 1990s, India and Myanmar have sought rapprochement through geo-economic strategies and discourses. The results, however, have been largely underwhelming. This paper offers an explanation for why this has been the case. We argue that the two geo-economic strategies deployed—sub-regionalism and diaspora-driven trade and investment—require the emergence of particular types of deterritorialised and denationalised citizenship regimes which f…
The natural/neglected relationship
Recent commentary on India–Australia relations has defined the relationship as ‘natural’ and based on ‘shared values’ and ‘shared history’. The relationship has simultaneously been considered ‘neglected’. The paradoxical juxtaposition of a natural/neglected partnership is yet to be adequately explained. We consider the historical construction of liberalism in both states as a facet of state identity to argue that, far from creating a natural rela…
A Shared History
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 expresse…
The identity politics of India–US nuclear engagement
Although its precise definition is contested, the concept of the ‘Anglosphere’ has grown in political discourse in the past decade. Anglospherist authors have defined it as a group of states tied together on the basis of shared tradition, laws, liberty and language. And yet they do not discuss India substantively, placing it firmly on the outside of its hierarchy. Others have argued the concept is based in a racialised, Anglo-Saxon identity. In 2…
British East Africa Protectorate
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…
International relations and the Himalaya
This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a…
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 natural/neglected relationship
Recent commentary on India–Australia relations has defined the relationship as ‘natural’ and based on ‘shared values’ and ‘shared history’. The relationship has simultaneously been considered ‘neglected’. The paradoxical juxtaposition of a natural/neglected partnership is yet to be adequately explained. We consider the historical construction of liberalism in both states as a facet of state identity to argue that, far from creating a natural rela…
Making a settler colonial IR
Disciplinary 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 wit…
Solidarity or hierarchy
The idea of solidarity between India and Africa has long drawn heavily from historical sources, including the anti-colonial legacies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, and ongoing frustration
Resignifying ‘responsibility
Postcolonial scholarship on nuclear weapons has demonstrated that mainstream literature perpetuates a set of orientalist discourses about 'Enlightenment' and 'civilization' which legitimizes global hierarchies. What has been less studied is the role of non-Western countries in challenging or perpetuating these discourses. This article focuses on the discourse of 'nuclear responsibility' as it has been deployed by Indian official to challenge West…
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…
A Shared History
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 expresse…
A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964
This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplo…
Australian foreign policy and news media
This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as 'rising' superpowers whose prominence offered…
Myanmar and India
Since the 1990s, India and Myanmar have sought rapprochement through geo-economic strategies and discourses. The results, however, have been largely underwhelming. This paper offers an explanation for why this has been the case. We argue that the two geo-economic strategies deployed—sub-regionalism and diaspora-driven trade and investment—require the emergence of particular types of deterritorialised and denationalised citizenship regimes which f…
The identity politics of India–US nuclear engagement
Although its precise definition is contested, the concept of the ‘Anglosphere’ has grown in political discourse in the past decade. Anglospherist authors have defined it as a group of states tied together on the basis of shared tradition, laws, liberty and language. And yet they do not discuss India substantively, placing it firmly on the outside of its hierarchy. Others have argued the concept is based in a racialised, Anglo-Saxon identity. In 2…
British East Africa Protectorate
The identity politics of India–US nuclear engagement
Although its precise definition is contested, the concept of the ‘Anglosphere’ has grown in political discourse in the past decade. Anglospherist authors have defined it as a group of states tied together on the basis of shared tradition, laws, liberty and language. And yet they do not discuss India substantively, placing it firmly on the outside of its hierarchy. Others have argued the concept is based in a racialised, Anglo-Saxon identity. In 2…
Myanmar and India
Since the 1990s, India and Myanmar have sought rapprochement through geo-economic strategies and discourses. The results, however, have been largely underwhelming. This paper offers an explanation for why this has been the case. We argue that the two geo-economic strategies deployed—sub-regionalism and diaspora-driven trade and investment—require the emergence of particular types of deterritorialised and denationalised citizenship regimes which f…
The natural/neglected relationship
Recent commentary on India–Australia relations has defined the relationship as ‘natural’ and based on ‘shared values’ and ‘shared history’. The relationship has simultaneously been considered ‘neglected’. The paradoxical juxtaposition of a natural/neglected partnership is yet to be adequately explained. We consider the historical construction of liberalism in both states as a facet of state identity to argue that, far from creating a natural rela…
A Shared History
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 expresse…
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…
Australian foreign policy and news media
This article explores the utility of a constructivist-media communications approach to understanding the production of national identity in Australia through a case study of the Australian Labor Party's 2011 decision to allow uranium sales to India. The decision came at a time when Australian foreign policy, political debate and news media discourse were increasingly concerned with India and China, as 'rising' superpowers whose prominence offered…
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…
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…
Solidarity or hierarchy
The idea of solidarity between India and Africa has long drawn heavily from historical sources, including the anti-colonial legacies of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, and ongoing frustration
Comrades against imperialism
Comrades against imperialism: Nehru, India and interwar internationalism, by Michele L. Louro." Asian Studies Review, 43(2), pp. 353–354
Resignifying ‘responsibility
Postcolonial scholarship on nuclear weapons has demonstrated that mainstream literature perpetuates a set of orientalist discourses about 'Enlightenment' and 'civilization' which legitimizes global hierarchies. What has been less studied is the role of non-Western countries in challenging or perpetuating these discourses. This article focuses on the discourse of 'nuclear responsibility' as it has been deployed by Indian official to challenge West…
Empire and Asian Migration
Constructing an “Iron” Unity
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 projec…
International relations and the Himalaya
This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a…
A “Hindu Mystic” or a “Harrovian Realist”? U.S., Australian, and Canadian Representations of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964
This article analyzes how officials from the U.S., Australia, and Canada represented Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s psychology in diplomatic contexts between 1947 and 1964. Nehru was the representative of a newly sovereign state, whose people were often stereotyped as mystical, spiritual, and irrational. In this article, we show how Nehru was constructed as “irrational,” “primitive,” “effeminate,” and racially resentful by Western diplo…
Making a settler colonial IR
Disciplinary 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 wit…
Bordering the postcolonial state
In 1975, two small territories with distinct identities were incorporated within larger postcolonial states: in April, the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim became a state within the Republic of India, while in December, the Republic of Indonesia annexed Portuguese (East) Timor. From 1975 to 1982, India voted against all United Nations General Assembly resolutions supporting East Timor's self-determination. While Western states' support is well documen…
The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains
The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya. It does so by focusing on the entanglements between ecology and international politics in the Himalaya. 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, …
Decolonising Australia's International Relations? A Critical Introduction
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 relationsh…
Bordering Ladakh, Again
In August 2019, the Indian government dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir, designating its Northern region as the Union Territory of Ladakh. Two months later, it released a new Political Map of India on which Ladakh was drawn as one of India’s largest territories. Like most representations of territory on political maps, the claims made were simplified. India’s rendering did not acknowledge that Pakistan and China administered much of Ladakh…
Geopolitics of Melting Mountains
‘From K2 to Kanyakumari, Bharat is One’
One of the first things travelers to the Indian Himalaya remark upon are the curious, often rhyming and comedic, road signs of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) dotting the strategic roads of the region. In this article, I ask what role road signs play in physically narrating, constructing and altering the imagination of the contested high-altitude region of Ladakh. I provide a combined discursive and visual analysis of military-origin road sig…
Political science (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (15 works) · History (11 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Australian History and Society (6 works)