Abstract
We begin the 80th issue of the India Quarterly with a sense of deja vu. Looking at the state of the world in January of 1945, the editor of the first issue of the Quarterly remarked on a ‘time of exceptional difficulty in India and the world’s history’, a difficulty he put down to ‘the lack of a sense of direction that men (sic) do not know whether they are marching to a secure peace and plenty, or to recurring war and economic insecurity…’ (IQ No.1, January 1945). Eighty years later, we seem no nearer to a sense of direction. The last year alone has seen two devastating conflicts where world institutions and powerful actors have exhibited a singular lack of will in keeping the peace. Fundamentalist ideologies and neo-nationalisms have raised old spectres, and states have teetered to balance economic interests and security while confronting an increasingly insecure and complex world. This is despite the fact that most issues of survival now fall into the realm of the glocal and look to peace, not war, for solutions. How states, leaders and policymakers address these issues is the subject of the articles in this issue.
In our neighbourhood alone, the contradiction between Islamicist ideologies and development creates conflict, as does the rise of new nationalist agendas. Since 2021, in its second coming, the Taliban in Afghanistan has confronted a whole new set of seemingly intractable political problems, threatening to put any rational policy at risk. Any hope that an enabling economic environment could emerge on the back of its mineral resources, an important national asset, would require a new kind of Taliban wedded to nation-building, development and commitments to a global net zero agenda, as one author argues. Further down the Himalayas, the assertion of ‘Nepali Nationalism’ raises claims to territory and the demands to define boundaries. However, even as some worlds close off, others open up to older, historically obscured meanings of connectivity and community. Here, as another article argues, the Bay of Bengal region could build on local connections to revive a dynamic history while providing relevance to its geographical position in the current geopolitical context of the Indo-Pacific.
Even as policymakers grapple with a host of increasingly complex issues, policies and actors are open to greater scrutiny today. As another set of articles argues, from diverse positions, media now has an interface with policymaking institutions which could create new pressures and fashion policy in unprecedented ways, the global human rights regime penetrates domestic social policies in uncomfortable ways, forcing states to respond or defend postures in international institutions, hindsight provides insights into the failure of hard power to meet foreign policy objectives, and soft power objectives can often be met by practices and models which lie outside the frame of conventional foreign policy. Significantly, when the history of foreign policy is written, scholars and researchers are now questioning how archives are curated, what bureaucratic pathways documents take or do not take, and the context of decisions rather than succumb to partisan views of success and failure. If the direction of the world remains unclear, the pattern of policymaking, at least, is not.