South Asia Institute

The United Nations University Series on Regionalism, launched by UNU-CRIS and Springer, offers a platform for innovative work on (supra-national) regionalism from a global and inter-disciplinary perspective. It includes the policy-oriented World Reports on Regional Integration, published in collaboration with other UN agencies, but it is also open for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions from academics and policy-makers worldwide.

On 22 June 2018, President Danny Faure of the Seychelles arrived in India for a six-day state visit. In a press statement welcoming the President, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a US$100 million (S$136.4 million) line of credit to the Seychelles for the purchase of military hardware from India so as to improve the country’s maritime capacity. He also stated that they would work together on the Assumption Island project, “keeping in mind each other’s interest in this regard”.1 The latter part of the announcement, referring to India’s role in a stalled project to develop facilities on the island, caught many by surprise. It marks the latest twist in a story about India’s growing maritime ambition and the interlocking of domestic and global geopolitics in the Indian Ocean.

In 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence, Britain decided to " detach " the Chagos Islands (with a land area of 60 square kilometres and 54,400 square kilometres of ocean) from the rest of what was then its Indian Ocean colony. This became the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and, in 1966, the largest island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, was leased to the United States (US) as a military base. At the time of the separation, Britain paid Mauritius US$3.8 million (S$5.2 million) and pledged to cede the islands when

Mauritius has a deep and special relationship with India, resting upon historical migrations, religious affinity and close defence relations. At more than 60 per cent of the population, Indo-Mauritians are the politically dominant ethnic group. On 28 July 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping stopped in Mauritius, the second visit by a Chinese president to the Indian Ocean island nation in less than 10 years. India has been, and continues to be, the country’s de facto security guarantor. However, preserving its influence will require a fine balancing act.

It has been announced that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit the Islamic Republic of Iran from 22 May 2016. Expectations are high that he will firm up the Chabahar Agreement, committing substantial Indian investment to develop the all-weather, deep-sea port for Iran. This would mark a culmination point in a project that has long been envisioned and planned. Chabahar could become a gateway linking Eurasia to the Indian Ocean littoral

On December 4, 2016 the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Heart of Asia- Istanbul Process (HoA-IP) was held in the north Indian city of Amritsar and attended by over 40 delegations, including Russia, China and the United States. The meeting was inaugurated by the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani and the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi and co-chaired by India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Afghanistan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Salahuddin Rabbani. Formed in 2011 as a platform for Afghanistan, and its neighbours, to discuss regional cooperation to promote stability, peace and prosperity, the initiative now includes over 20 other nations and organizations “supporting” the process. The participating countries include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates.

On 10 February 2018, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit the Palestinian territories. He arrived in Ramallah in a helicopter from neighbouring Jordan, escorted by Israeli Air Force choppers. The trip to Jordan also marked a milestone as the first prime ministerial visit in 30 years. Next on the four-day agenda was the United Arab Emirates, where Modi was paying a second visit in less than three years, followed by a maiden visit for him to Oman. Aside from the fanfare and symbolism of Modi's personalised style of diplomacy, there is clear strategic intent behind the efforts to deepen relations with countries to the west of India.

Trump set in motion procedures to reinstate strict sanctions on Tehran. The remaining signatories of the agreement are busy trying to salvage the deal. America's unilateral decision has implications for India's geo-political interests in Iran and beyond.

On 6 October 2017, the 14th annual summit between India and the European Union (EU) took place in New Delhi, India, with the stated aim of deepening their strategic partnership and advancing collaboration in India’s priority sectors for growth. Aside from reaffirming shared principles and values, three important pacts were signed. The India-EU relationship has evolved gradually over 55 years of diplomatic engagement. In 2004, India became a strategic partner of the EU and the two sides launched free trade negotiations in 2007. However, stalled negotiations led to an impasse in 2013 and a summit was held in 2016 after a four-year hiatus. Following the meeting in 2017, there is reason for cautious optimism about putting the partnership to work.

Over the last two years, there has been a flurry of high-level official visits between India and Sri Lanka. In February 2015, President Maithripala Sirisena of Sri Lanka visited India followed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was in Sri Lanka in March 2015. Just recently, in May, Modi concluded a second visit to Sri Lanka, as did Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was in India in September 2015 and April 2017. In addition, there have been a number of ministerial meetings between the two sides.

On 3 December 2017, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated a much awaited US$1 billion (S$1.35 billion) project to expand Shahid Beheshti Port at Chabahar, located in Iran’s south-eastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan. Chabahar is the country’s sole deep-water harbour and only direct access point to the Indian Ocean. This is also an achievement for India, following the port development pact signed in 2016 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Tehran, in which India committed to making US$500 million (S$676 million) available to develop the port and related infrastructure. Hopes are high for a boost in regional trade and connectivity. However, doubts persist over the port’s viability. In particular, India faces a tricky challenge in managing relations with Iran and the United States at a time of global uncertainty.

In St. Louis, the demand to defund the police has dovetailed with long-lasting struggles against cash bail and the abuse of prisoners. The Board of Aldermen’s passing of a bill that promises to start closing the city’s most notorious jail reflects the movement’s strength — but also the need for pressure to ensure that abolitionist demands are not watered down into merely cosmetic reforms.

At a time of Black Lives Matter and the proliferation of migrant, refugee and minority protests across the world (Polish women's, Belarusian, Palestinian, Roma and Sinti, to name just a few), as well as local and regional initiatives by minorities, migrants and refugees, we would like to bring together scholars who combine a focus on migrants or minorities with that on protest, resistance, activism, social engagement, and other related themes. We are interested both in the most visible struggles and everyday forms of activism, emerging activism, prefigurative politics, and other efforts of migrants and minorities, which often escape public and academic recognition.

"Researchers, activists and artists have demonstrated the devastating intergenerational effects of gun violence, among them trauma and disability/debilitation among survivors and kin of persons shot or killed. Following in the footsteps of work done by Jodi Rios,1 Keona Ervin2 and Barbara Ransby,3 I conducted fieldwork in St. Louis, Missouri, between March 2018 and October 2019 on organizational forms, political subjectivities and transformative processes led by a Black-led coalition of organizations, actors and movements. I volunteered for the campaign “Close the Workhouse” and for the Bail Project. During this time, I attended protests, meetings among activists, public events, informal get-togethers, city hall interventions and, in 2020, a range of online events developed by a Black-led coalition of organizers in St. Louis. Although the focus of my research was not gun violence, the issue appeared prominently throughout the time I spent in the St. Louis area. Contrary to the near-exclusive emphasis on mass shootings I found in national media coverage, I became interested in how Black organizers in St. Louis had been working to address broader problems of violence and reframe the debate to foreground the problems facing their neighborhoods, thereby providing an antiracist intervention to the debate..."

India's new and contested status as a nuclear power 2 , the scale of her arms purchases, 3 her investment in missile technology 4 and the huge deployment of ground troops on the western front against Pakistan are issues of immediate concern to her South Asian neighbours. Since tension feeds on tension, war in Afghanistan, terrorist attacks in Kolkata, Delhi, Jammu and Srinagar, mounting tension between India and Pakistan over the issue of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and the recent threat by General Pervez Musharraf to consider the first

Despite participation in national and regional elections and occupation of office both at the centre and in the regional governments, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has not acquired the aura of moderation. It has not achieved acceptance into the party system of India in a manner that would make it comparable to Christian Democratic parties in Europe. This appears puzzling in the light of Downs' moderation thesis, which suggests that regular participation in free, fair and competitive elections transforms extremist parties to moderates as they converge towards the median voter. The article approaches this puzzling counterfactual in intra-system comparison by drawing on the case of Sikh nationalism. With a focus on BJP, the article presents an analysis of party competition, party programs, policies and public opinion data on issue positions and the social base of the party. In conclusion, three general enabling conditions are identified that help explain the deviant case of the ambivalent moderation of the BJP.

email: js3Ȱix.urz.uni-heidelberg.de. Governance, subnationalism, rational choice theory, and comparative politics are his main areas of interest. His recent publications are Culture and Rationality (1999) and Democracy and Social Change (1999).