Asserting sovereignty across its territories remains the primary purpose of the modern State. There exist two kinds of sovereignties: legal sovereignty and de facto sovereignty. While legal sovereignty encompasses the formal ideologies of rule and legality, de facto sovereignty includes the actual ability to kill, punish, and discipline a specific fragment of society or a section of it. Non-State actors can also perform the latter deeds.
Research Assistant, Manohar Parrikar IDSA, Mr Muneeb Yousuf’s research article ‘India-Afghanistan Relations in Changing Regional Geopolitics’ has been published in South Asia Research Journal (SAGE) on 23 September 2023.
Despite much distrust and many misgivings, India’s Afghanistan policies have to be robust, focused on defending its geopolitical interests and concerns against China’s expansionist clout, while seeking to promote a multipolar world order, a strategy that appears like a reincarnation of India’s earlier path of non-alignment, says Mr Yousuf.
Research Assistants, Manohar Parrikar IDSA, Dr Mohd Usman Bhatti and Mr Muneeb Yousuf’s article ‘A Problem in the Making: Deepening Wheat Crisis in Gilgit-Baltistan and federal government's cold response’ has been published in Greater Kashmir, on 18 July 2023.
The conspicuous US withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in a political vacuum, garnering immediate attention of regional and great powers alike. In The Comrades and the Mullahs, presenting Afghanistan’s long history of foreign invasions and resistance, journalists Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny show how the country was a theatre for the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires, and later got caught in Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan has certainly become a diplomatic predicament for India.
The political dispute over the territory of Kashmir is an intricate problem confronting the modern South Asian leadership. The intricacies of the conflict have led to voluminous writings on the region and evident from them is a greater focus on Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) as compared to the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The ‘escape’ of Pakistan–occupied Kashmir from the scholarly radar has begun to change only recently.
