India and the sovereignty principle: the disaggregation imperative

ABSTRACT

The Special Issue examines the salience of the sovereignty principle with reference to India and its engagement with other states and entities in the international system. It seeks to disaggregate sovereignty from an abstract formulation to the operational level and evaluate how the principle has shaped India’s conduct over the years across a range of issues and locales. The Special Issue engages with “traditional” topics in IR like wars as also with emerging topics like data and its ownership to help readers understand how the sovereignty principle has been impinging on India’s policies. The articles offer a comprehensive picture of how India’s appreciation of the sovereignty principle has evolved since 1947.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Stephen Philip Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001), 84.

^2. Ibid., 87.

^3. International relations refers to the discipline (and not the process) and indicates at literature that has emerged from a self-conscious IR standpoint utilizing theories and concepts in the discipline.

^4. See Raphaelle Khan, “Sovereignty after the Empire and the Search for a New World Order: India’s Attempt to Negotiate a Common Citizenship in the Commonwealth,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 49, no. 6 (2021); Atul Mishra, The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan: Post-Partition Statehood in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021); Priya Naik, “The Case of the ‘Other India’ and Indian IR Scholarship,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 8 (2014).

^5. Ian Hall, “India and the Responsibility to Protect,” in New Directions in India’s Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis, ed. Harsh V. Pant (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Rohan Mukherjee, “Embattled Sovereignty: India, the UN, and Humanitarian Intervention,” India in Transition, Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, February 11, 2013, https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/rmukherjee (accessed September 26, 2019); Ramesh Thakur, “Intervention, Sovereignty, and the Responsibility to Protect: Experiences from ICISS,” Security Dialogue 33, no. 3 (September 2002).

^6. Hall, “India and the Responsibility to Protect,” 177–8.

^7. Amitav Acharya, Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 34–6.

^8. Happymon Jacob, “The Evolution and Practices of Indian Notions of Sovereignty,” in China, India, and the Future of the International Society, ed. Jamie Gaskarth (London: Rowman and Littlefield International Limited, 2015), 20–1.

^9. Hall, “India and the Responsibility to Protect,” 178.

^10. Mukherjee, “Embattled Sovereignty”

^11. Prabhash Ranjan, India and Bilateral Investment Treaties: Refusal, Acceptance, Backlash (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019).

^12. Aniruddha Rajput, Protection of Foreign Investment in India and Investment Treaty Arbitration (Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer, 2018).

^13. Georgios Dimitropoulos, “National Sovereignty and International Investment Law: Sovereignty Reassertion and Prospects of Reform,” Journal of World Investment and Trade 21, no. 1 (2020); Edward Guntrip, “Self-Determination and Foreign Direct Investment: Reimagining Sovereignty in International Investment Law,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2016).

^14. For scholarship that focuses on the adversarial relations, see Brahma Chellaney, “Water, Power, and Competition in Asia,” Asian Survey 54, no. 4 (2014); Brahma Chellaney, Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011).