As India’s power and prominence rise on the international stage, its longstanding tradition of democracy is under threat. Since establishing a secular and democratic constitution in 1950, India has held elections at the local, state, and national levels with frequent transitions of power between opposing parties. This commitment to democracy has provided political order to a country that is twice the size of Europe and with a stunning array of social and economic divides. Despite this rich tradition, India’s democracy faces an unprecedented threat with the rise of Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. After decisively winning general elections in 2014, Modi and the BJP have pursued a range of anti-democratic policies in which the state and society are used to undermine the opposition, to stifle free speech, and to harass religious minorities. The Troubling State of India’s Democracy brings together leading scholars from around the world to assess the conditions of India’s democracy across three important dimensions: politics, specifically the state of political parties and the party system; the state, including the condition of federalism and the health of various institutions; and society, including NGOs, ethnic and religious tensions, and control of the media. Even though elements of India’s democracy seem to function—like its commitment to elections—the contributors document a disturbing trajectory, one that not only threatens to undermine India’s own stability, but could also affect the global order.

The study of Indian politics has witnessed a dramatic revival worldwide in the last few decades. There have been significant developments in national politics since 2014 with the advent of the single-party majority government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the first such majority since 1984. Moreover, the results of the 17th Lok Sabha (Lower House) election in India in 2019 have had major implications for the party system in India. In the light of these developments, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics provides the most comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of the state of contemporary Indian politics. To that end, it examines the evolution of core institutions, processes, policies, and associated issues that are being debated in India's politics. It also provides historical contexts, discusses the state of the extant literature in each issue area, and suggests avenues for future research. The contributors to this volume are all noted scholars and researchers in their respective fields of specialization located both in India and around the world. The major topics covered include the Constitution, citizenship, the houses of Parliament, the Cabinet, the judiciary, federalism and local governments, elections, parties and coalitions, secularism and minorities, caste, gender and migration, political violence, political finance, political economy, and foreign and defence policies. In effect, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics offers scholars, analysts, and students a sweeping overview of the current landscape of Indian politics, with particular attention to issues that have emerged over the past decade.

No region in the world has been more hostile to democracy, more dominated by military and security institutions, or weaker on economic development and inclusive governance than the Middle East. Why have Arab states been so oppressively strong in some areas but so devastatingly weak in others? How do those patterns affect politics, economics, and society across the region? The state stands at the center of the analysis of politics in the Middle East, but has rarely been the primary focus of systematic theoretical analysis. Making Sense of the Arab State brings together top scholars from diverse theoretical orientations to address some of the most critically important questions facing the region today. The authors grapple with enduring questions such as the uneven development of state capacity, the failures of developmentalism and governance, the centrality of regime security and survival concerns, the excesses of surveillance and control, and the increasing personalization of power. Making Sense of the Arab State will be a must-read for scholars of the Middle East and of comparative politics more broadly.

Business and Populism analyses the relationship between right wing populism and business with a focus on business responses and strategies in the face of the global populist turn. In the neoliberal era business had become accustomed to favourable economic policy regimes and governance arrangements that facilitated business influence on key policy issues. The rise of populist movements in various parts of the world is widely perceived as a significant challenge to policymaking, mainstream political parties and even to liberal democracy. Yet we know very little about the impact of populism on business, beyond the fact that the anti-elite challenge of populism frequently targets business with policies to restrict globalization, outsourcing, and labour migration whilst at the same time embracing capitalism, low taxes, and deregulated markets. Populists also glory in presenting themselves as authentic representatives of the people, symbolizing this in their demotic language, their rejection of standards of 'polite' society and liberal 'woke' values, including attacking core intermediary institutions such as independent central banks, the judiciary, the civil service, universities and expert knowledge, and a free press central to post-1945 versions of liberal democracy. When faced with these disruptions and the risks they pose for business, how does business respond? Does it choose to support or challenge populists in different countries? This volume advances the debate by providing empirical studies of the impact of right-wing populism on business. Finally, it considers whether populism will continue to be influential and how its success might impact on business strategy and structure.

Authoritarianism seems to be everywhere in the political world—even the definition of authoritarianism as any form of non-democratic governance has grown very broad. Attempts to explain authoritarian rule as a function of the interests or needs of the ruler or regime can be misleading. Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want argues that to understand how authoritarian systems work we need to look not only at the interests and intentions of those at the top, but also at the inner workings of the various parts of the state. Courts, elections, security force structure, and intelligence gathering are seen as structured and geared toward helping maintain the regime. Yet authoritarian regimes do not all operate the same way in the day-to-day and year-to-year tumble of politics. In Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want, the authors find that when state bodies form strong institutional patterns and forge links with key allies both inside the state and outside of it, they can define interests and missions that are different from those at the top of the regime. By focusing on three such structures (parliaments, constitutional courts, and official religious institutions), the book shows that the degree of autonomy realized by a particular part of the state rests on how thoroughly it is institutionalized and how strong its links are with constituencies. Instead of viewing authoritarian governance as something that reduces politics to rulers’ whims and opposition movements, the authors show how it operates—and how much what we call “authoritarianism” varies.

Assessing the condition and potential trajectories of India's democracy

Kessler-Mata argues for a constitutive theory of tribal sovereignty based on the interconnected relationships between tribes and non-federal governments.

This book presents an overview of the main changes in the United States' foreign policy in response to the transformations in the international order in the last decades. If, after the end of the Cold War, the USA invested in the universalization of market economy and in the strengthening of its military supremacy, new developments demanded reorientations in the country’s foreign strategy. The controversial military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the rise of right-wing populism altered the global political landscape and demanded new responses from the most powerful country in the world. This volume brings together nine essays in which the founding member of the World International Studies Committee, Sebastião C. Velasco e Cruz, analyzes how the United States’ foreign policy responded to the growing challenges posed by this changing international order, discussing topics such as: The evolution of the American geopolitical strategy after the end of the Cold War How US foreign policy reacted to challenges to security and dilemmas of the international order Barack Obama's foreign policy and world politics Donald Trump and the rise of populism in the USA US relations with BRICs and Latin America The United States in a Troubled World: Essays on Interpretation will be of interest to international relations and political science researchers both within and outside the United States.

This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

About the Book A SHARP AND NECESSARY ANALYSIS OF THE NATURE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS INDIA FACES TODAY In 1975, the Indira Gandhi government declared Emergency in India, unveiling an era of State excesses, human rights violations, the centralisation of power and the dismantling of democracy. Nearly half a century later, the phrase ‘undeclared emergency’ gathers currency as citizens and analysts struggle to define the nature of India’s present crisis. In Undeclared Emergency, Arvind Narrain presents a devastatingly thorough examination of the nature of this emergency—a systematic attack on the rule of law that hits at the foundation of a democracy, its Constitution. This clear-eyed legal analysis of its implications also documents an ongoing history of constitutional subversion, one that predates the Narendra Modi-led NDA government—a lineage of curtailed freedoms, censorship, preventive detention laws and diluted executive accountability. Is history repeating itself then? Not quite. This book is an account of an inaugural era in Indian history. Narrain shows that the Modi government, unlike the Congress government of 1975, draws on popular support and this raises the dangerous possibility that today’s authoritarian regime could become tomorrow’s totalitarian state. A lament, Undeclared Emergency is also a war cry. It charts an alternative inheritance of resistance, acts big and small from the Emergency of 1975, the current day and times long gone. Dissent, Narrain says, is an Indian tradition. The Second Coming is at hand, and Narrain reckons that we have a responsibility to determine what it will look like.