Asian Dynamics Initiative

NORTH SOUTH Symposium biographies

	Lessons from the twentieth-century India’s non-aligned politics Swapna Kona Nayudu Swapna Kona Nayudu is Lecturer of Global Affairs, Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She is also member of the Advisory Board, Harvard University Association for Global Political Thought. Swapna took her PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, University of London. Swapna’s work is most centrally focused on the politically transformative nature of war. To that end, her research interests are in, and she teaches courses in International Relations, International History, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, the Cold War in the Third World, UN Peacekeeping and Security Studies.
	Asia and the Global South C Raja Mohan Professor C. Raja Mohan is a Senior Fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute in New Delhi. Earlier he was the Director of Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore and currently a Visiting Research Professor there. Prof Mohan taught South Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Professor Mohan is one of India’s leading commentators on India’s foreign policy. He has been associated with a number of think tanks such as the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, the Centre for Policy Research and the Observer Research Foundation. He was also the founding director of Carnegie India, New Delhi. He was the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in International Affairs at the United States Library of Congress, Washington DC, from 2009 to 2010. He served on India’s National Security Advisory Board. He led the Indian Chapter of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1999 to 2006. He writes a regular column for the Indian Express and was earlier the Strategic Affairs Editor for The Hindu newspaper, Chennai. Among his recent books is Samudra Manthan: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Indo-Pacific (2013) and Modi’s World: Expanding India’s Sphere of Influence (2015).
	Is Global South an Empty Signifier? Vineet Thakur Vineet Thakur is a university lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and has previously worked at Ambedkar University (Delhi), University of Johannesburg and SOAS London. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Amsterdam, and Smuts Vesting Fellow at Cambridge University. He is the author of V.S. Srinivasa Sastri: A Liberal Life (2023); India’s First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (2021); The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (2020 – with Alexander Davis and Peter Vale); South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (2020 – with Peter Vale; winner of the Francesco Guicciardini Prize for the Best Book in Historical International Relations); Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa (2018) and Jan Smuts and the Indian Question (2017).
	Hijacking Third-Worldism: Notes Towards a Critical Approach Christopher J. Lee Christopher J. Lee is Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. He has published seven books on different aspects of African history, decolonization, and anti-colonial liberation struggles. His most recent book is an edited volume of essays, literary criticism, reportage, and other non-fiction by the South African writer and activist Alex La Guma (1925-1985) entitled Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966-1985 (London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2022).
	Bengal, 1905, and the Making of the International System Pallavi Raghavan Pallavi Raghavan is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University. Her book, titled Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship, 1947 – 1952 was published in 2020, by Hurst& Co. (UK), and OUP (US). For her current project, she is interested in developing a broader history of the British Empire’s theories of Partition and their consequences for the world today.
	New India and Emergent Geopolitical Mobilizations Khusdeep Kaur Malhotra Dr. Khusdeep Kaur graduated with a PhD in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple University in 2022. Her research examines the experiences of Kashmir's Sikh community in the context of the state's protracted violence and militarization, exploring their 'in-betweenness' in the violence, their relationship with discourses of occupation and nationalism, and day to day survival in a place where they lack both substantive representation and political patronage. Spatializing Sikh belonging in Kashmir, Kaur's research opens up new ways to think about violence in Kashmir, examining how Sikhs maintain intercommunal solidarities and are accorded the status of a 'favored' minority by both state and insurgents. Addressing the question of Sikh invisibility, it forces us to move beyond the binaries of Kashmir as a Hindu-Muslim or India-Pakistan conflict, and complicates our understanding of discourses of 'occupation' and 'nationalism' and the political identities they engender. Currently, Kaur is in a research position at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where she is conducting research on college going women's transitions through the space of university and the city, to understand how these transitions shape their retention in STEM careers.
	The Non-aligned movement: A historical perspective Jürgen Dinkel I am a historian and currently represent the Chair of Social and Economic History at the University of Duisburg-Essen. From October 2023, I will substitute the Chair of Contemporary History at LMU Munich. Inequalities are at the center of my research. In my dissertation on the Non-Aligned Movement, I show how states of the Global South networked internationally from the 1920s to the 1990s in order to influence fundamental processes of the 20th century – decolonization, the Cold War, global trade rules, information flows – and to eliminate global inequalities. In my second book, I analyze property regimes as well as inheritance patterns in three cities (Baltimore, Frankfurt, and Odessa) and among immigrants. I show how the categories of wealth, class, gender, race and citizenship influenced the transfer of property and how inequalities were perpetuated in the United States, Germany, and Russia since the 19th century. Currently, I am working on a transnational history of anticolonial and postcolonial activists and movements in Germany from the 19th century to the present. Selected Publications: The Non-Aligned Movement. Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927–1992), New Perspectives on the Cold War, Bd. 5, Boston/Leiden: Brill 2019. Alles bleibt in der Familie. Erbe und Eigentum in Deutschland, Russland und den USA seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Industrielle Welt, Köln 2023. [All stays in the Family. Inheritance and Property in Germany, Russia and the United States since the 19th century].
	Open Embrace: India-US Ties in a Divided World Varghese K George Varghese K George is Resident Editor of The Hindu, in New Delhi. He has previously worked as the newspaper’s US correspondent, based in Washington, DC, and political editor, based in New Delhi. He has written extensively on politics, political economy, society and the foreign policy of India and the US, particularly the rise of nationalism in both countries in recent years and its impact on their ties with the world. Prior to joining The Hindu, he was chief of bureau at Hindustan Times. He has also worked for the Indian Express in various roles. His reports have won several awards, including the Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year, the Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Reporting, the Transparency International Award for fighting corruption and the International Press Institute Award for Excellence in Journalism. His book Open Embrace: India-US ties in a Divided World (Penguin Viking) is an exploration of how hyper nationalist domestic politics are reshaping the strategic priorities of the world’s oldest and the biggest democracies, and their relations. The book draws from his experience of covering domestic politics and foreign policy in both India and the US. Varghese is an MA in Modern Indian History (Delhi University) and M Phil in International Relations (Jawaharlal Nehru University).
	Thinking a post-imperial world today Raphaëlle Khan Raphaëlle Khan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York (CUNY) and an Associate at the Harvard Asia Center. She works at the intersection of International History and International Relations, with particular interest in the role of decolonised states in shaping and contesting the world order in the 20th century and the international politics of South Asia. She is currently completing her book, provisionally titled The Struggle for Sovereignty: India, decolonisation, and international organisations, 1919-1961. She has co-edited the volume Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2017) and has contributed to Human Rights, Empires, and Their Ends: The New History of Human Rights and Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She has also published in Modern Asian Studies, The International History Review, and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.
	Non-aligned Netherworld: “Internal Security” and Other Military agendas in Africa-Asia networks Shobana Shankar Shobana Shankar is Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook, State University of New York. She just concluded a fellowship in the African Program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she worked on her next book on centuries-old informal economies and the making of multidirectional migration of people, goods, and ideas between Nigeria and India. This book builds in new directions from her book An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, published by Hurst/Oxford in 2021. It is the first history of how race and racialization have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart; it was shortlisted as a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section Book Award. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa and Africa-South Asia networks and covers themes related to missionaries and religious conversion, humanitarian politics, medicine, intellectual history, and critical development studies. Her earlier books include Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975 (Ohio U. Press) and co-editor of two collections on religious politics and globalization. She has received fellowships from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Fulbright, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Historical Association, and others. She also writes for wider audiences in Africa as a Country, the Conversation, Washington Post, and others on topics such as lessons for the U.S. on Nigeria’s experience with vaccine hesitancy and eugenics at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
	Nonalignment: the tense alliance between India and the ANC Thomas Blom Hansen Thomas Blom Hansen is Professor of Anthropology and Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Chair in South Asian Studies at Stanford University. He has been appointed Honorary Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies with special connection to Modern South Asian Studies.
	‘New India’ and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Non-Alignment as an Aspiration to Power Kate Sullivan de Estrada Kate Sullivan de Estrada is Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony’s College, and an Associate Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Her research focuses on India's role and identity as a rising power, nuclear politics in South Asia, and India's strategy in the Indo-Pacific. She has served as Principal Research Analyst for India at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, delivered expert testimony on the UK-India relationship to two UK parliamentary inquiries, and continues to engage across Whitehall (and beyond) on the UK's policy towards India. A parallel strand of her research and policy engagement centres on Indian Ocean security, where she worked with the Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) from 2018 to 2019 as an Oxford Policy Exchange Network Fellow. From January 2024, she will be pursuing a project entitled Balancing ‘Sovereignty Trade-offs’ in Small-State Maritime Security Co-operation, funded by Research England’s Policy Support Fund.
	International Order and its Discontents Rohan Mukherjee Rohan Mukherjee is an assistant professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, he was an assistant professor of political science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. His research focuses on the grand strategies of rising powers and their impact on international security and order, with an empirical specialization in the Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
	Small States in an Uncertain World Ravinder Kaur Ravinder Kaur, Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies directs the Asian Dynamics Initiative, a cross-faculty program at the University of Copenhagen. Kaur works across the disciplines of history, anthropology, and international politics. Her long-term research has focused on two critical transformations in the history of modern India. She received Dr. Phil at University of Copenhagen in 2023. Anders Wivel Anders Wivel is Professor of International Relations and Head of PhD Programme. His most fundamental research interest is how small states overcome power asymmetry and vulnerability in international relations. More generally, he focuses on foreign policy, small states in international relations, peaceful change, and power politics and IR realism. Wivel is a member of the Department of Political Science research group on International Relations. He cooperates on a regular basis with the Centre for Military Studies (CMS). Rasmus Mariager Rasmus Mariager is Associate Professor in Contemporaty European and Danish History at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen. He was previously an Assistant Professor at University of Southern Denmark and before that he worked for a commission that investigated the surveillance conducted by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service during the Cold War. Mariager has also contributed to a White Book on Denmark during the Cold War 1945-1991. Rasmus Mariager is Editor-in-Chief of Scandinavian Journal of History, and he has written 7 volumes and edited 12 volumes on the Cold War in Europe and transatlantic relations.