India and global governance across international regimes and time

ABSTRACT

India’s rising power and status within a variety of global institutions is well explained with the help of an inside-out approach, with a focus on India’s domestic compulsions and strategies. This special section of four articles in Contemporary South Asia deepens this inside-out analysis, combining it with an outside-in approach to global institutions which explore how the global regime in question shapes and interacts with domestic impulses and dilemmas. The four papers explore India’s approach and actions across a divergent set of global institutions such as the IMF, the WHO, and maritime governance in a regional context, showing how the institutional and geopolitical context matters to understanding India’s diverse actions and strategies. These articles also explore the evolving process of compliance and implementation within each specific global institutional context. Such a comparative approach allows us to understand how the specific institutional design of the relevant organization or the structure of the global regime affects India. In this introduction to the special section, I outline the advantages of an interactive, comparative approach, exploring India’s varying actions across a variety of issue areas and global contexts. Such a variegated and differential analysis across global regimes is valuable for a more complete and differentiated analysis of India’s rise.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• international organizations
• rising power
• implementation dilemmas
• comparative approach

Acknowledgements

I thank Surupa Gupta, Karthik Nachiappan and Ivan Lidarev for Comments. Anya Syed helped me check for references. I also thank Barbara Koremenos and Lisa Martin for feedback on the larger project.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 https://www.imf.org/en/Countries/IND.

2 See, Chwieroth (2014), Coplovitch (2010), Stone (2002, 2011), Woods (2006), Bodansky (2001) and Speth and Haas (2006).

3 One exception is Weller and Xu (2015). Also, see Xu and Weller (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aseema Sinha

Dr Aseema Sinha is the Wagener Chair of Comparative Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA. She previously taught at University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC. Her research interests relate to political economy of India, federalism, India–China comparisons, International Organizations, and the rise of India as an emerging power. She has authored a book, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), which received the Joseph Elder Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Her book titled, Globalizing India: How Global Rules and Markets are Shaping India's Rise to Power was published by Cambridge University Press (2016). She is also author of journal articles on the WTO, trade policy, political economy of India, federalism, subnational comparisons in India, India and China, business collective action in India, and public expenditure across Indian states. Her articles have appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, World Development, Polity, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Business and Politics, Journal of Democracy, International Affairs, and India Review.