Vikash Yadav

Neo-liberal ideology, as an abstract technique of self-governance and population management, is often viewed as tolerant of extreme inequality within a market economy. However, the range of policy proposals that flow from the ideology are not necessarily insensitive to development projects in marginalised areas. Sensitivity to market mechanisms may inject pragmatism in contexts where states are unable or unwilling to supply capability enhancing public goods. Through an analysis of the Center for Urban and Regional Excellence’s proof-of-concept development project in India, this article argues that a market-oriented framework can be useful in mitigating collective action problems.

The prospects for an end to the protracted conflict between India and Pakistan appear as remote as ever. In fact, it is likely that there will more deadly provocations in the future by terrorist groups based on Pakistani soil. In a recent op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, C Christine Fair noted that in the future “Pakistan is likely to become more reliant, not less, on nuclear-protected jihad to secure its interests. Pakistan’s fears of India are chronic and are likely to deepen as India continues its ascent on the world stage.”

The notion of “nuclear protected jihad” is simultaneously chilling and perplexing.

The perplexing aspect of the rivalry is that Pakistan’s anxieties about India should have been alleviated once it tested nuclear weapons in 1998; thereby negating India’s conventional military superiority and achieving a level of strategic nuclear parity. However, instead of creating a “hard shell,” the possession of nuclear weapons seems to have only heightened paranoid anxieties about further dismemberment and even dispossession of its nuclear arsenal.

Book Review Essay:

• Harpviken, Kristian Berg. Social Networks and Migration in Wartime Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
• Porter, Patrick. Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Zaeef, Abdul Salam. My Life with the Taliban. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

This advanced political economy course investigates the historical project to revive political and economic liberalism as an art of (self-) governance after liberalism's collapse at the end of the long-nineteenth century. The transnational revival of liberalism through the aegis of the Mont Pèlerin Society represents one of the most successful intellectual projects in modern history as it has shaped the policies of economies around the world. Against the rising tide of collectivism, the new liberalism effectively and boldly advocated for unfettered economic competition, limited government, and individual freedom constrained primarily by the rule of law.

As the world order created by the United States comes to a close and the center of power shifts from the North Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, a new, multiplex world order is unfolding. The world order shapes our identity and security, as well as opportunities for employment, prosperity, and justice. This course aims to help you decipher emerging trends, persistent obstacles, and current events by equipping you with concepts, theories, and historical/cultural knowledge to assess critically a rapidly transforming world order.

Globalization is a process through which trans-boundary flows of goods, capital, labor, and ideas come to be increasingly interdependent on a planetary scale. The phenomenon of globalization affects core political institutions as well as multiple facets of cultural reproduction , social practices, and conceptions of personal identity. Although technological innovations enhance processes of globalization, the legal and coercive authority of states ultimately underwrite the process of globalization. Globalization is a fragile phenomenon; it is neither inevitable nor unstoppable. This course investigates the political economy of the global order that has emerged in the post-Bretton Woods era.