The relationship between India and Iran is often framed through civilizational memory and historical continuity, yet its modern trajectory reveals a far more contingent and uneven reality. Since India’s independence in 1947, engagement between the two countries has been shaped less by sentiment and more by shifting geopolitical pressures, economic necessities, and the gradual centrality […]
Posted inAnalysis, Asia, Long Read
Domestic Strategy and International Opportunity: The Abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir
India-U.S. Relations and Kashmir Year U.S. Administration Key Event/Action U.S. Perception/Position on Kashmir 1947-48 Harry S. Truman First Indo-Pak War Supported UN resolution for plebiscite; viewed Kashmir as an international issue. 1950s Dwight D. Eisenhower Cold War Dynamics Preferred bilateral resolution but initially supported international mediation. 1962 John F. Kennedy Sino-Indian War Favored India with […]
Posted inAnalysis, Asia, Long Read
Domestic Strategy and International Opportunity: The Abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir
This study presents a historical and analytical examination of the domestic, bilateral, and international factors—particularly the role of the United States—that may have contributed to the change in the administrative status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, when Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was abrogated. The explanation centers on three interrelated factors: first, […]
Posted inBRICS, Economy, Global South
The Housing Divide in BRICS
Housing has emerged as one of the most revealing indicators of how economic growth, urban transformation, and inequality interact across the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—and the bloc’s newer members Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Together, these countries account for a significant share of the world’s population, construction […]
Posted inBRICS, energy, International relations, Technology
Electric Vehicles and the Struggle to Command the Future
China occupies a central and structurally dominant position in this landscape. By the mid-2020s, it accounted for around two thirds of global EV and new energy vehicle sales. Its domestic market for new energy vehicles—including battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and increasingly, two- and three-wheeled electric transport—exceeded ten million units annually, with some official counts […]
Posted inBRICS, Global South, International relations, Latin America
Coordination Without Command in the Global South
Multinational organizations outside the framework of formal alliances have long experimented with a distinctive form of coordination, one that seeks influence without hierarchy and cooperation without surrendering sovereignty. Groupings such as the Non-Aligned Movement, ASEAN, the African Union, BRICS, CELAC, Mercosur, and the Latin American Integration Association were never designed to impose uniformity. They emerged […]
Posted inGlobal South, International relations
Sovereignty, Power and the Case for Non-Alignment
In recent years, the language of sovereignty has returned to international forums with an urgency that many had assumed belonged to an earlier era. Statements invoking non-intervention, territorial integrity, and sovereign equality are no longer confined to archival speeches from the Cold War. They are voiced today amid sanctions regimes, regime recognition disputes, and economic […]
Posted inGlobal South, International relations
Non Alignment and the Grammar of World Politics
When the Ugandan representative rose at the United Nations to speak on Venezuela, invoking sovereignty and non-intervention on behalf of the Non-Alignment Movement, the moment resonated beyond the immediate dispute. It recalled a moral vocabulary of world politics that many assume has been eclipsed by sanctions regimes, alliance systems, and the normalization of intervention. Yet […]
Posted inGlobal South, International relations, Latin America, Opinion
Politics without Compromise
I remember my time in León, Nicaragua around 2007-2009. For a long time, I was hanging around the headquarters of a leftist-intellectual opposition movement, the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista (MRS). Historically, they had belonged to the same overall Sandinista movement as Daniel Ortega, the person who once before had been Sandinista president in the 1980s had […]
Posted inInternational relations, Latin America
The Long Shadow of Intervention in the Americas
The history of the Americas is inseparable from the history of American intervention. Over two centuries, presidents in Washington have repeatedly claimed the authority to decide which governments in the hemisphere are legitimate, which are dangerous, and which must be removed. These decisions have been justified in different idioms—civilisation, security, anti-communism, democracy—but they have produced […]