India China: Rethinking Borders and Security – Book Launch
May 22, 2017 , 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
India China: Rethinking Borders and Security
Book launch with authors:
L.H.M. Ling, Adriana Abdenur, Payal Banerjee, Nimmi Kurian, Mahendra P. Lama, Li Bo
Monday, May 22, 4:00-6:oo pm
Orozco Room (712), 66 West 12th St
Remarks by:
Mary Watson, Executive Dean, NSPE
Tansen Sen, Professor, CUNY
Ashok Gurung, Senior Director, ICI
About the Book
Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.
Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.
Ling and her collaborators have ambitions that are not merely explanatory but also transformative: they seek not merely to make sense of an existing conflict, but by diagnosing it in terms of blocked flows and interrupted balances, they seek to envision ways to resolve (or, better, to dis-solve) it. If the more typical IR explanatory social-scientific question would be ‘why is this India-China conflict as virulent as it is?,’ their question is instead ‘what does the present state of the conflict reveal about how to change things?’ The transformative question encompasses the explanatory question and presses it onto novel terrain; call the results ‘explanation-plus.’
—Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Editor, Configurations Series, University of Michigan Press and Professor, School of International Service, American University
About the Authors
L. H. M. Ling is Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York, USA.
Nimmi Kurian is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, India, and India Representative, India China Institute, The New School, New York.
Mahendra P. Lama is a Professor in the School of International Studies at Jawarhalal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, India.
Li Bo is a part-time consultant for environmental grant-making in China and chief editor of the Green Cover Book: Annual Review of China’s Environment, a Chinese publication. At the same time, he runs a small organic farm by Lake Huron in Canada.