Papers by Sasikumar S.Sundaram
Journal of Global Security Studies, Feb 18, 2020
What are the processes through which strategic political actors legitimize their preferred policy... more What are the processes through which strategic political actors legitimize their preferred policy choice with multiple audiences in international politics? This article builds a conceptual framework of rhetorical dissociation where strategic actors present normative justifications hierarchically to gain acceptance among different audiences. Such hierarchizing works in three interconnected ways whereby strategic actors delineate audience types, create a rhetorical presence to resonate with sympathetic audiences, and establish a bounded dialogue in their legitimation politics to sideline the normative validity claims of other audiences. By engaging with International Relations (IR) theories of strategic legitimation, this article contributes to this field by showing how strategic actors use multiple audiences in the game to their advantage and wrestle a distinct normativity through rhetoric so that it fits their strategic goals. I illustrate the model by empirically examining India's strategic legitimation of intervention in the East Pakistan crisis in 1971. This article also sets the stage for further empirical examination of strategic legitimation, particularly in engaging with humanitarian crises abroad.
Indian Politics & Policy, 2019
The Cape Town Agreement of 1927 was the first-ever bilateral agreement within the British Empire ... more The Cape Town Agreement of 1927 was the first-ever bilateral agreement within the British Empire in which Britain was not involved. Signed between India and South Africa soon after the Balfour Declaration of 1926, the Agreement heralded a new sovereign order within the Empire. For India, the Agreement also holds a special importance because it was negotiated, for the first time, by an Indian-led delegation. In this article, we narrate how the agreement came about, situating it within the contingencies and constraints of putting into practice India's anomalous international identity in the context of an emerging norm of racialized sovereignty in the 1920s.
International Affairs, 2022
Journal of International Political Theory, 2019
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challengin... more Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in international politics. Building upon these works, we are concerned with a question of how to examine the context of international practices that unfolds in multiple ways in practitioners’ performances. Our central thesis is that a distinct pragmatic methodology offers an opportunity to keep with the practice turn and avoid the problematic foundational moves of mainstream practice theorizing. This involves foregrounding three interrelated processes in examining practices: the role of exceptions in the normal stream of performances, normative uptake of the analyst...
International Theory, 2019
How does rhetoric work in the pursuit of political projects in international relations? This arti... more How does rhetoric work in the pursuit of political projects in international relations? This article analyzes how rhetoric-wielding political actors engage in reasoning to bolster their position by drawing upon norms that underwrite interactions, and audiences as scorekeepers evaluate the reasoning by making a series of inferences. I call this mechanism rhetorical reasoning. Building on the existing classification of norms in constructivist international relations (IR) and utilizing three distinct norm types – instrumental, institutional, and moral – I show the different processes through which political actors deploy rhetoric to legitimize and justify political projects and the distinct logics through which scorekeepers make inferences and evaluate the project. This article contributes to IR theories of argumentation by providing a sharp conceptualization of political rhetoric and actor–audience relationships in the game. I illustrate the mechanism of rhetorical reasoning using Bra...
Journal of Global Security Studies
What are the processes through which strategic political actors legitimize their preferred policy... more What are the processes through which strategic political actors legitimize their preferred policy choice with multiple audiences in international politics? This article builds a conceptual framework of rhetorical dissociation where strategic actors present normative justifications hierarchically to gain acceptance among different audiences. Such hierarchizing works in three interconnected ways whereby strategic actors delineate audience types, create a rhetorical presence to resonate with sympathetic audiences, and establish a bounded dialogue in their legitimation politics to sideline the normative validity claims of other audiences. By engaging with International Relations (IR) theories of strategic legitimation, this article contributes to this field by showing how strategic actors use multiple audiences in the game to their advantage and wrestle a distinct normativity through rhetoric so that it fits their strategic goals. I illustrate the model by empirically examining India...
International Relations
Although the recent advancements in critical constructivist IR on political rhetoric has greatly ... more Although the recent advancements in critical constructivist IR on political rhetoric has greatly improved our understanding of linguistic mechanisms of political action, we need a sharp understanding of how rhetoric explains foreign policy change. Here we conceptualize a link between rhetoric and foreign policy change by foregrounding distinct dynamics at the regional and domestic institutional environments. Analytically, at the regional level, we suggest examining whether norms of foreign policy engagement are explicitly coded in treaties and agreements or implicit in conventions and practices of actors. And at the domestic level, we suggest examining whether a particular foreign policy issue area is concurrent or contested among interlocutors. In this constellation, we clarify how four different rhetorical strategies underwrites foreign policy change – persuasion, mediation, explication and reconstruction – how it operates, and the processes through which it unfolds in relation to...
International Studies Quarterly
How do reputations work in international politics? The dominant frameworks in international relat... more How do reputations work in international politics? The dominant frameworks in international relations scholarship argue that reputation is subservient to real interest or past actions do not influence observers’ behavior in anarchy, and inconsistent reputational beliefs are irrational among policymakers who have miscalculated their interests. These substantialist accounts are problematic in the light of taking political practices seriously. I argue that reputations work within communities of practice through a tripartite process involving actor's entitlement claims, audiences’ relational evaluation of such claims, and the actor's performance to secure entitlements in issue-specific interactions. I illustrate the analytical usefulness of this conceptualization against conventional accounts by studying Brazil's multiple reputational concerns in the issue area of humanitarian crises in the post–Cold War period. The framework offered in the article has a wider relevance for ...
International Theory, 2019
How does rhetoric work in the pursuit of political projects in international relations? This arti... more How does rhetoric work in the pursuit of political projects in international relations? This article analyzes how rhetoric-wielding political actors engage in reasoning to bolster their position by drawing upon norms that underwrite interactions, and audiences as scorekeepers evaluate the reasoning by making a series of inferences. I call this mechanism rhetorical reasoning. Building on the existing classification of norms in Constructivist IR and utilizing three distinct norm types – instrumental, institutional, and moral – I show the different processes through which political actors deploy rhetoric to legitimize and justify political projects and the distinct logics through which scorekeepers make inferences and evaluate the project. This paper contributes to IR theories of argumentation by providing a sharp conceptualization of political rhetoric and actor-audience relations in the game. I illustrate the mechanism of rhetorical reasoning using Brazil’s UN peace enforcement operation in Haiti in 2004 to give empirical evidence for the role of institutional norm type in patterns of rhetorical reasoning and contestations in international politics. Paying attention to the political rhetoric in the actor-scorekeepers’ relations in this way clarifies important issues regarding the varieties of political projects and the different role of normativity in the game
Journal of International Political Theory, 2019
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challengin... more Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing. In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in international politics. Building upon these works, we are concerned with a question of how to examine the context of international practices that unfolds in multiple ways in practitioners’ performances. Our central thesis is that a distinct pragmatic methodology offers an opportunity to keep with the practice turn and avoid the problematic foundational moves of mainstream practice theorizing. This involves foregrounding three interrelated processes in examining practices: the role of exceptions in the normal stream of performances, normative uptake of the analysts, and the semantic field that actors navigate in political performances. We argue that this methodology is predicated on its usefulness to interpret practices through reflective social-science inquiry.
A Theory of Contestation is an ambitious and rather challenging book that brings ideas from publi... more A Theory of Contestation is an ambitious and rather challenging book that brings ideas from public philosophy to international relations analysis, but reaches far beyond existing debates on global governance. Wiener offers a theory of contestation and engages with the question of legitimacy in global gov-ernance from a new perspective. One helpful way Wiener suggests to think about the overall project she undertakes is to consider it in the context of a broadly critical constructivist approach to normativity. For critical constructivists, the meaning of norms is both constituted by and constitutive of specific uses by actors. In other words, norms are both structuring and constructed by actors through social practice. They do not merely function as " causal factors " that uniformly create some behavioral responses in the social world. To turn this conception of norms into an account of addressing actual governance challenges that are faced by political actors in international relations, contends Wiener, one needs to embrace contestation as the basis of democratic legitimacy in global governance rather than as an obstacle to social order. The central task Wiener undertakes is to provide an account of how norm contestation works as a practice and how it can fill—not close—the legitimacy gap in international relations. Using three thinking tools—the normativity premise, the diversity premise, and the concept of cultural cosmopolitanism—Wiener outlines a theory of contestation based on contested-ness as a meta-organizing principle of legitimate governance in the global realm. One of the book's original contributions is its claim that in order for the legitimacy gap between fundamental norms and standardized procedures to be filled, one needs to recognize the importance of organizing principles at the intermediate level as a stabilizing force for global governance and to provide access to regular contestation at this level for all involved stakeholders.
Books by Sasikumar S.Sundaram
IDSA Journal, 2024
Global South has become an important locus of debate in recent Tyears in international politics. ... more Global South has become an important locus of debate in recent Tyears in international politics. From popular reports, pundits, and media analysts to academics engage in articulating the centrality or dismissing the utility of the Global South states. Some focus on the decline of the West and show why the Global South-and some ambitious leaders of the Global South, such as India, Brazil, or South Africa will play a central role in global transformation. Here, conversations on the future of the rules-based international order take centre stage. For John Ikenberry, the Global South states are swing stages that can play a central role in tilting the balance either towards progress and democratic order or towards autocracy and disorder (Ikenberry, 2018, 2024). For Charles Kupchan, the complexities of multiple modernities mean that the West must devise a modus vivendi with the Global South instead of
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Papers by Sasikumar S.Sundaram
Books by Sasikumar S.Sundaram