This article explores the concept of human security and examines the scope for its adoption as a normative and policy framework in India. Human security prioritises non-military methods as a means of achieving security without compromising the priorities accorded to traditional security threats. It requires the fulfilment of people’s basic needs and rights.

• D. Padma Kumar Pillay |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

China has always been an important neighbour to Nepal which has otherwise historically been heavily influenced by India. The ‘rise of China’ has created a more outward-looking Middle Kingdom and so its influence in Nepal has significantly increased within the last decade. As a consequence, Nepal is experiencing growing interest from China. This article aims to give some historical background to Sino-Nepalese relations and to measure the most recent impact of the ‘rise of China’ on Nepal, particularly on its economic, military and political fronts.

• Bibek Chand , Lukas K. Danner |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

India was always aware of the enormous energy reserves within its geographically proximate Central Asian region that could potentially fulfil its energy demands. The recent visit by Prime Minister Modi to the region has proved critical in paving the way for India to finally acquire a long awaited energy stake in the region. The new developments could not have been possible without the evolving undercurrents of the new geopolitical balance of power in the region. Russia seems to be playing a conspicuous role in nudging both India and Pakistan towards cooperation in the energy pipeline.

• P. Stobdan |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

The rise of Dawlat al-Islamiyah f’al-Iraq w Belaad al-Sham (Daesh), or Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in the vacuum created by the war in these countries has reignited the Kurdish question that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk skilfully bypassed after World War I, when several nation-states were carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Kurdish problem began in the early 19th century when the Ottomans centralised the administration, emphasised Turkish identity, erased the autonomous Kurdish emirates and ruthlessly suppressed their protests.

• Sandhya Jain |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

In this commentary, I will use strategic cyberwar theory1 to explain why India has a higher level of cyber resilience than several of its potential adversaries. Even if India has challenges in its government-led cyber defence,2 there are cyber resilience benefits to be drawn from the way Indian society operates, functions and is constitutionally designed and accepted by its constituents, independently of any cyber defence efforts. First, the concept of strategic cyberwar.

• Jan Kallberg |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

Myanmar is an underrated neighbour with the potential to influence India’s vital strategic and economic interests. To keep track of the pulse of the mystic nation that is India’s closest Southeast Asian neighbour demands not just a scholarly approach but an empathy and an emotional connect. Rajiv Bhatia’s book, India–Myanmar Relations, is timely as it comes during a period when Myanmar is going through a significant phase of transition. Myanmar today stands at a crossroads confronted by a combination of developments on the domestic, regional and global planes.

• Udai Bhanu Singh |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

Actors, events and processes that determine the characteristics of the political scene in contemporary India may rightly be understood via a number of tropes—all equally useful and deficient at the same time. This is especially true in case of the ongoing churning in Indian democracy. If for the decade of the 1990s the tropes were Mandal, Market and Mandir, the tropes to understand contemporary politics in India have acquired the shape of ‘Governance’ and ‘Development’.

• Shashank Chaturvedi |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

Until recently, most top officials in India who had dealt with very sensitive issues in government refrained from writing about them. The adage they followed was that what everyone wanted to know could not be written, and what could be written was something that no one was interested in. Not surprisingly, even when former civil servants have written anything, it has generally been a self-serving swansong of their accomplishments, which other than them no one really considers accomplishments.

• Sushant Sareen |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

The burgeoning scholarship on the army’s role in nation building, or the lack of it, is unsurprising. In the modern political order, a nation without its own army is hardly imaginable. A crucial relationship exists between the two, which is also a reason for the uneasiness about the army’s pro-active involvement in the nation-making process. Political sociologists have been uncovering striking causal relationships that demonstrate the crucial role of the army and its internal ‘organisation’, ‘control’ and ‘function’ for the subsisting units of the modern world system: nation-states.

• Nazir Ahmad Mir |
• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis

• M.S. Prathibha |
• November 2015 |
• Strategic Analysis