A Preliminary Mapping of the Disciplinary History of International Relations in India

Introduction

International Relations (IR) ⁱ has been witnessing a momentous churning over the past couple of decades, with an emerging challenge to the dominance of a monological West-centric understanding and a recognition of the need to decolonize/pluralize/globalize the discipline. This change is reflected in various endeavours that aim to explore the possibilities of understanding the discipline through alternative, non-Western, multicultural histories of ideas, knowledge production and theory-building. While the study of IR has had a special place in academic programmes in India since independence in 1947, in the recent past the discipline has witnessed a new dynamism aimed at developing an Indian IR, contributing to a global understanding of the discipline. Significant research has emerged, calling for an exploration of non-Western histories and traditions of thinking, thereby contributing to knowledge production for a global IR (Acharya, 2014). Further, genealogical enquiries are being conducted towards tracing connected histories and multicultural roots of ideas and practices of IR (Bayly, 2024).

The article classifies the evolution of IR studies in India in three broad phases. The first phase looks at the early decades of IR teaching and research after independence. The second phase begins after the end of the Cold War, when Indian scholars started analyzingf IR studies in the context of changing nature of international relations. The third phase, described here as re-envisioning IR in India, began in the first decade of the 21st century. This phase is characterized by efforts to decolonize the discipline through post-Western theorization and by revisiting the history of the discipline in order to explore connected history. In this article, it is argued that while IR research in India has received a new vigour in the recent past, registering its global appeal in providing alternative forms of theorizing, a more cohesive idea of what is being pursued as Indian IR within India is yet to evolve. IR in India still struggles with the binary of the mainstream and the critical, where the former is largely characterized by the predominance of a realist (or sometimes liberal) understanding and a foreign policy-oriented approach embedded within that understanding while critical IR emphasizes alternative lens for understanding the international and re-envisioning it from different vantages. Much of the literature related to re-envisioning efforts is still marginal in IR circles in India. These works, however, have been making their way into the syllabi of IR papers taught in universities across the country and are also emerging as significant areas of research. However, the discipline needs to be better equipped in terms of institutional mechanisms for collaborative research as well as a methodological and pedagogical overhaul across the national and regional levels in the country. This article attempts to undertake an exploration of the disciplinary history of IR in India and the contemporary state of the discipline in light of these significant developments in international studies globally.

The article is divided into five sections. The first section briefly discusses the story of the origin and evolution of IR as a discipline at the global level to understand the context within which its nature and subject matter were shaped in India. The second section traces the disciplinary history of IR in India through a mapping of the evolution of the subject as it has been introduced and developed in the universities and think tanks in the early decades and the nature of the research conducted within the discipline. Section three looks into the developments in the field of IR studies towards the end of the Cold War, contesting its origin and evolution to understand the context within which the efforts to revitalize IR in India are embedded. These developments have been characterized by efforts that call for revisiting the subject matter of the discipline, challenging its linear chronology and hegemonic Eurocentrism. The fourth section explores the developments geared towards re-envisioning IR in India. This section discusses the various entry points through which the re-envisioning effort can be understood. This includes the critical turn in IR in India, reflecting a quest for greater agency and recognition of identity in defining the contours and content of the discipline. The section further looks at works that aim to decolonize IR through a non-Western/post-Western understanding of the ‘international’, as well as those that do so through a revisionist history of international thinking in India. The fifth section comprises the concluding remarks.

The Origin and Evolution of IR

The disciplinary history of IR in India cannot be comprehended while ignoring the origin and evolution of IR as a discipline in the West, which has an integral bearing on how its nature and subject matter are studied and understood. The epistemological terrain of the discipline has been conditioned by the Euro-American context of its birth, and so has the stimulus for later revisiting it in the quest for a non-Western, post-Western or global avatar of the discipline. In order to understand this resonance better, this article attempts to navigate the developments in the discipline in the West while mapping the disciplinary history and development of IR in India.

The emergence of international relations as a discipline is a relatively recent event, fundamentally grounded in the histories, experiences, conceptual categories and intellectual traditions of Europe and the USA. This, in turn, entailed an invisibilization of the histories, interlinkages and patterns of interaction of the remaining, much larger part of the world. It has been quite some time since the dominance of a West-centric understanding in the discipline of IR has been put under the scanner by scholars from multiple quarters across the globe, highlighting that the mainstream theories need to be challenged on the grounds that evidence from Western histories and Euro-American contexts forms the basis of prescribing universal propositions (Hobson, 2012). However, the study of IR in most parts of the world is primarily and fundamentally informed by the historical meta-narrative about the origins of IR and Eurocentric theoretical approaches. Consequently, the disciplinary history of IR traditionally rests on this meta-narrative about the origins of what constitutes its subject matter, that is, the nature and scope of IR and the ‘what, when, how and why’ associated with them.

The genealogical roots of IR have been conventionally traced back to the peace treaties of Westphalia (1648) in the discipline of IR. The origins of the study of these relations as a distinctive field of inquiry are dated to ‘an epistemological big bang of 1919’—the ‘benchmark date’ on which the ‘discipline itself exploded into existence’ (Blaney, 2020; Buzan & Lawson, 2015, p. 49; De Carvalho et al., 2011, p. 736). The establishment of the discipline came as an intellectual response to World War I, wherein, in terms of institutionalization, the first Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics was established by David Davis at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1919. After that, the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford established their own chairs of international politics in 1923 and 1930, respectively. Also, prominent think tanks, like Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), were established in 1920 and 1921, respectively. These think tanks played a crucial role in institutionalizing IR as an autonomous discipline (Acharya & Buzan, 2019, p. 84). Meanwhile, universities in both the USA and the UK established their own research institutes, started advanced courses on international affairs and came up with some early textbooks on IR (Acharya & Buzan, 2019, pp. 85–86). Private enterprises like Rockefeller and Carnegie funded some research institutes to proliferate the discipline of IR in the Western world (Guilhot, 2011). In its initial years, the discipline of IR was more of a ‘British social science’ (Thakur & Vale, 2019, p. 35). The thinking and institution-building were influenced by or associated with the British imperial state (Thakur & Vale, 2019, p. 35). However, the post-World War II history of IR was fundamentally part of the ‘American social sciences’, aimed at fulfilling US foreign policy objectives in the international system (Hoffmann, 1977).

The history of the discipline of IR has been narrated through the ‘great debates’, primarily entrenched within different ‘paradigms’ and ‘traditions of thought’, following a teleological pattern (Schmidt, 2002). The first debate took place during the interwar period over the causes of war, with realism and idealism offering competing explanations. A second debate took place in the 1960s, over the issue of methodological choices for the study of international phenomena—scientific and rational or philosophical and historical. In the 1970s, a third great debate, which is now called the ‘inter-paradigm debate’ (Wæver, 1996), took place among three different paradigms—realism, pluralism and structuralism—with their own unique understanding of IR. In the 1980s and 1990s, newer debates unfolded in IR and were classified as ‘rationalism versus reflexivism’ (Smith et al., 1996). Where on the one hand, approaches such as realism and liberalism—with their ‘neo-neo’ variants—are part of rationalist philosophical discussion, on the other hand, new approaches like feminism, postcolonialism, constructivism and the English school are considered reflexivist approaches (Smith et al., 1996). Another important classification was provided by Robert Cox, who differentiated between two types of theories—problem-solving theories, which take the world as it is and work towards sustaining it, and critical theory, which challenges the naturalized assumptions of problem-solving theories and argues for radical changes and emancipation (Cox, 1981).

The development of the field of IR in India, like in most of the non-Western world, has resonated with the birth, evolution, raison d’être and spread of the discipline in the West. The next section discusses how the discipline found roots and began to take shape in India in the early 20th century.

Disciplinary History and Development of IR in India

The early introduction and study of the discipline of IR in India took place alongside the proliferation of the Westphalian international order to the non-Western parts of the world. The discipline largely imported the subject matter of IR, that is, the ‘what, when, why and how’ of the Western counterparts. This is not to say that there was an absence of indigenous thought on the subject matter, which indeed did exist and was vocalized in different forums of expression. However, systematic theorization or inclusion of the thought traditions in the curricula of the discipline or research on what could qualify as ‘Indian IR’ were developments that did not take place. ⁱⁱ Regarding the former aspect, it has been opined that in the Asian contexts, knowledge production and theorization in the positivist tradition have not been a priority (Alagappa, 2011; Mallavarappu, 2012). With respect to the latter, recent research highlights the existence of a rich lineage of anti-colonial thought and dialogues on internationalism that constituted the prehistory of the study of IR in India (Bayly, 2022).

However, the manner in which research in the think tanks, as well as the curriculum and pedagogy of the discipline in the universities, took shape contributed to the discipline being described as atheoretic and technocratic in nature, ⁱⁱⁱ serving as a guide to the bureaucracy of a newly independent state. For long now, IR in India has been struggling with the quest to amalgamate its rich corpus of international thought, a product of its own historical experience of self-expression and determination, into the rubric of the discipline. It is pertinent to explore the development of the discipline of IR in India before this quest became a significant concern for research and pedagogy.

The origin of the discipline of IR in India is genealogically rooted in the establishment of the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) in 1943 and the Indian School of International Studies (ISIS) in 1955 (Bajpai and Mallavarappu, 2005; Shahi, 2016; Sharma, 2009). The establishment of the discipline of IR is fundamentally associated with the birth of the independent Indian state in a bipolar world order. The internationalist worldview and practice of the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led to the creation of institutions that were devoted to the study of IR. In a report submitted to UNESCO on University Teaching in International Relations in India, Angadipuram Appadorai, a towering figure in IR in India and the first Secretary General of India’s first independent think tank on world affairs (ICWA), highlighted the significance of the study of IR in Indian universities for individual and social life, given the international character of society (Appadorai, 1954).

However, till the early 1950s, the subject matter of IR was discussed in courses available in history, political science, economics and law, and not as an independent course in itself. Only the University of Allahabad offered a Master’s course on diplomacy and international affairs, and the Universities of Patna, Utkal, Aligarh and Lucknow offered 1-year diplomas in IR (Shahi, 2016). Appadorai acknowledged that during the time of submission of the report, little progress had been made in terms of the teaching of the discipline in universities, primarily because it was not taught as an integrated subject and there was little availability of documents and research material on the subject. As part of the recommendations, the study of Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Far East, apart from the necessary knowledge of European history, was emphasized. Optimism was expressed regarding ICWA cooperating with the universities to stimulate the study and teaching of IR (Appadorai, 1954). However, as discussed later, rather than growing into conversations of mutual enrichment, they parted ways and followed divergent trajectories.

During the 1950s–1970s, multiple programmes and courses were offered by universities in India to study IR as an essential component of political science. In 1955, the ISIS was established, which was later renamed the School of International Studies as a part of Jawaharlal Nehru University. The school became ‘the first institution in the country to promote “Area Studies” and to develop expertise on countries and regions of the world’ (Agarwal, 2006). Its early mandate was to serve as an arm of the foreign policymaking process of the country. Later, in the light of the developments in the discipline of IR, the mandate was revised in 2006 ‘to develop, use, and test theory to frame the issues with which Area Studies engage’ (Agarwal, 2006). The Department of African Studies, established in the University of Delhi in 1955, is the oldest Area Studies (mentioned hereafter as AS) programme in the country. While an elaborate discussion on the relationship between AS and IR is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to mention the significance of the former in providing impetus to meaningful knowledge generation in the latter, and this was widely accepted in the early decades in India. ^iv However, several shortcomings have been identified that characterize the plight of these programmes, including issues related to subject matter and a lack of theory (Sahni, 2009).

Thus, the early decades of study and research in IR, largely, did not engage with questions of subject matter, methodology and theorization. In fact, it was the idea of non-alignment that bagged the status of a meta-narrative or original contribution on modern India’s role in world politics. Much of the literature on IR in the 1980s revolved around a discussion of the doctrine and its implications for world affairs. The January 1981 issue of the journal International Studies was a special issue exclusively devoted to discussion on various aspects of non-alignment. Significant literature was produced to sculpt an Indian conception of the ‘international’, situating it in different dimensions of the paradigm of non-alignment (Appadurai, 1981; Misra, 1981; Rana, 1980). Some later works called for drawing theoretical insights from the doctrine (Acharya, 2016). However, the idea fell short of theorization, given the predominance of realism as the mainframe of meaningful understanding of international politics. Although liberalism and constructivism had begun to provide some critique, postulates of political realism dominated this phase of IR in India.

In the ensuing from the late 1980s into the 1990s, the Indian state geared up to expand its economic and military power for the preservation of its national security and integrity from both internal and external challenges. In this period, works that focused on national security, nuclear power and regional organizations constituted the core of IR in India. Nuclear politics (Vanaik, 1988), conflicts and peace processes (Phadnis & Ganguly, 2001), international law (Chimni, 1993) and regionalism in South Asia (Muni, 1996) also emerged as significant areas of research in the following decades.

This second phase marks a turn in the master narrative of IR in India, from non-alignment to modernization and development. The works focused on India as an emerging power in the international order, the economic rise of the Indian state, and non-traditional forms of security (Sahni, 2007). By acquiring nuclear weapons and sustainable economic growth, India sought to change its status in the international system from ‘soft’ state to with emerging power and also worked towards human progress and development for a sustainable future (Behera, 2009). This phase may be described as the ‘developmentalist’ phase of Indian IR. The works explaining these endeavours were still enveloped in the theoretical frame of the Indian Westphalian state at their core and there was less discussion of Indian IR in the broader IR epistemic community. However, works such as Rajagopalan (1998) and Bajpai and Mallavarappu (2005) offered newer insights about India as an alternative geo-cultural space, either through ideas explicating alternative conceptions of the world or rethinking the application of Western IR theories in the Indian context.

The state of IR till the 1990s has been criticized even by those who were instrumental in establishing and nurturing the study and research of the subject (Mattoo, 2009; Sharma, 2009). The discipline was criticized for a lack of theorizing, an excessive focus on regional studies to make good civil servants for the nation (Bajpai and Mallavarappu, 2005), captive within the parent discipline of political science, and lacking professional associations and journals that dealt with IR as an independent field of inquiry (Behera, 2009; Sharma, 2009).

Further, unlike Western IR, where the story of IR is told through the ‘great debates’, in India, no great debates took place. The discipline of IR in India predominantly spoke in the language of political realism and realpolitik: the state is a key actor, national interest is the primary objective of the state and the international system is anarchic in nature. The development of the discipline thus took place in a context wherein its umbilical relationship with the Indian state (Behera, 2007, p. 352) created scholarly goalposts of consolidating its status as a significant actor with a voice that gained meaning from the international system and its order. This phase of Indian IR has been described by scholars as ‘primitive’ (Shahi, 2016) and ‘traditional’ IR (Behera, 2007, p. 341).

With regard to the developments in the 1990s, it is observed that IR in India was adaptive to the changing circumstances of international affairs and changed its ‘master narratives’ corresponding to the objectives of the Indian state in the international system. IR in India, as a field of inquiry, modulated to the reconfigured reality of the world in which India found itself and sought to fulfil its aspirations of becoming a leading power. These fundamental trajectories were also reflected in the institutional development of IR in India (Shahi, 2016).

However, in both phases (the early and the developmentalist), the epistemological character of IR in India primarily took the state as a ‘given and unproblematic entity’ and as a theoretical ‘starting point’ of all scholarly endeavours in institutional centres of India (Behera, 2007, p. 348). There remained a lack of broader discussion in the IR community of establishing the study of IR as an independent field of inquiry.

Structurally, there was little inter-institutional collaboration, dialogue or conceptualization of discursive space that could come together to reflect upon the state of the discipline, the challenges it faced and the measures to overcome them. There was an absence of any meaningful collective agenda-setting associations or events taking place within the country, inviting wider participation and representation. The work that could contribute to meaningful knowledge construction in some of the premier think tanks remained confined within them and the promise of dynamic collaborations with the universities remained unfulfilled. In the absence of any substantive institutionalization, such collaborative explorations were left to individual enterprise and efforts. Unlike the annual congresses that characterized the stocktaking of the developments in some disciplines like history, political science and sociology, IR could not mobilize any regular pan-Indian meeting or association of scholars, academics and experts. While a number of insightful pieces on the state of the discipline have been published in the International Studies journal, they have not yet figured in the IR syllabi of any university for a beginner in the subject to be informed about what progress the discipline has made so far in India and what could be a future research agenda.

As mentioned earlier, given its Euro-American origins, the discipline of IR in the non-Western parts of the world has largely been shaped and propelled by the evolutionary trajectory of the discipline in the West. In India too, the intellectual inclinations and theoretical frameworks to enquire into IR followed the same path as did Western IR. The following section briefly discusses the churnings in the discipline of IR that took place towards the beginning of the 21st century, which help understand some of the significant developments that are shaping the debates and demands for an ‘Indian IR’ in the present century.

Revisiting of Disciplinary Origins and Narratives in IR

The end of the Cold War, in many ways, propelled scholars in the discipline to revisit the ways in which IR was understood and explained. Several key assumptions and narratives were challenged in the changing context of world politics. There was a search for visibility of ‘invisible disciplines’ in the broader social sciences disciplinary structure (Halliday, 1996, p. 319). In the late 1990s, works revisiting the disciplinary history of IR beyond parochialism and ethnocentrism emerged. The myth of the ‘origin of the discipline’ as well as its ‘atheoretical’ and ‘ahistorical’ nature was highlighted (Hobden, 2002). It was further pointed out that the subject matter of IR suffered from ‘transnational complacency, a vacuous scientism, and a mannered heteroglossia’ (Halliday, 1996, p. 320). Emphasis was laid on re-reading the discipline from a world historical perspective, and the need for theoretical pluralism was underscored (Booth, 1996; Halliday, 1996).

With the passage of time, the discipline of IR metamorphosed from a ‘silent’ and a ‘divided’ discipline to a more ‘argumentative’ and ‘global’ discipline (Booth, 1996). The early decades of the 21st century witnessed ‘turn-talks’ in IR, comprising discussions about the historical turn, sociological turn, linguistic turn, religious and cultural turn, rhetorical turn, aesthetics turn, reflexive turn and others (Heiskanen & Beaumont, 2023). Further, journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, the Review of International Studies, International Theory and the International Studies Review played a significant role in generating dialogue about theoretical pluralism in the discipline. Also, journals like Alternatives and Millennium offered a platform for alternative conceptualization and ideas in the area of IR, both Western and non-Western. Journals like International Political Sociology, Critical Studies on Security, the Journal of International Relations and Development, International Politics and Security Dialogue offered the space to develop theoretical and contemporary debates and discussions over the crises and issues in world politics.

Re-envisioning IR Studies in India

At the beginning of the 21st century, IR studies in India witnessed an increasing momentum towards a new turn as it became vocal about the pressing need to decolonize, pluralize and globalize the discipline. Efforts were taken to re-envision IR studies from multiple vantage points, salvaging it from the hegemony and preponderance of political realism. Also, given the churnings IR is witnessing globally in the quest towards consolidating itself as an independent field of study, there is a growing interest in the non-Western histories and contexts of IR theory as well (Alagappa, 2011). The widespread recognition of several shortcomings in IR studies in India led to initiatives seeking to address the former and reinvigorate the discipline. A stocktake of the state of IR in India took place in a workshop in Singapore in 2009. The report that resulted from the workshop was titled ‘Strengthening International Studies in India’. ^v

In the 21st century, IR, as an independent discipline, was invigorated, both in terms of theorizing and institution-building. Today, multiple universities, both private and public, offer separate courses and programmes in IR—beyond the hegemonic control of political science departments. ^vi Many more PhD research projects are focusing on indigenous ideas and practices. Also, the rise of think tanks has played an important role in making IR a significant discipline to study—both for academic and job-centric purposes (Alagappa, 2011). Most universities have undertaken the task of revising their syllabi and research manuals in the light of the evolution that the discipline is undergoing.

Today, international studies in India includes several critical, post-Western and global strands. The re-envisioning of IR studies in India encapsulates the varied strands that, through different entry points, attempt to come up with alternative epistemologies that engage with diverse ontologies and contribute to a pluralistic and global understanding of the discipline. Here they are broadly classified under four identifiable themes, namely the critical turn, decolonial IR, alternative theorization efforts and revisiting the history of IR in India. However, this is not a rigid classification and exhibits varying degrees of overlap.

Conclusion

In this article, an effort was made to preliminarily trace the disciplinary history of IR in India with the objective of assessing the present state of the discipline and the manner in which it engages with and contributes to the contemporary debates and developments of the discipline of IR in general. The article explores the institutional foundations and evolution of the discipline. It also examines the omissions and commissions that characterize the journey of the discipline from its predominantly West-centric footprints to the quest to decolonize it. A critical appraisal of the evolution of the discipline in India is placed side by side with a brief discussion of the evolution of the discipline itself. It is observed that for a very long time, the state of the discipline in India resonated with the dominance of political realism that characterized the nature of the discipline until the end of the Cold War. This was despite the fact that there has been a rich repertoire of indigenous thought on international concerns and there was never a dearth of original ideas on issues of universal significance. However, the very nature of the discipline, with its innate tendency to universalize and naturalize the West-centric understanding of international affairs, imposed the supremacy of its form and content and, in the process, invisibilized alternate worldviews. This led to an almost absolute absence of any discursive space where a plurality of ideas could converse.

Non-alignment was one such idea around which no theory-building exercise could take place and it was dismissed as neutralism in the Cold War world, which could only be comprehended through the realist lens. The history of the growth of IR in India, until the end of the Cold War, was a struggle to fit in the mainframe with ease or unease. The discipline lived in existential marginality as compared to the other social sciences, with little discussion over methodology and pedagogy. There were hardly any endeavours that would set the agenda for research in the discipline. It was only after the end of the Cold War that churnings in the discipline challenged the dominance of realism and opened up the discursive space in which multiple ideas, worldviews, histories and experiences could engage in a conversation.

This also gave a new momentum to IR in India, where research and study are now actively geared not only towards ways to decolonize the discipline but also to carve out what is called an ‘Indian IR’. This article makes an effort to map the various efforts towards decolonizing and theory-building that IR studies in India is witnessing today. Although these efforts constitute meaningful and promising interventions, they are still scattered and in formative stages. Whether they lead to an alternative IR or contribute to what is being termed ‘global IR’ is still to be seen. There still is a lingering binary of the mainstream and critical IR. Institutional measures are required to be undertaken in order to mainstream the critical, which is very crucial for building a strong and robust IR studies in India.