Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India

by Maya Chadda

Overview

Ethnicity, Security, and Separatism in India examines the connections between internal and external policy and the ways in which domestic ethnic conflicts shape a state's international security perceptions and policies. Chadda focuses on three ethnonationalisms and their international dimensions: Kashmir and Punjab in India-Pakistan relations and the Tamil issue in India-Sri Lanka relations. Chadda shows that India does not seek hegemony in South Asia; instead, it acts to protect its nation-building efforts from problems faced by neighboring countries. Paradoxically, this goal requires India to intervene in neighboring ethnic conflicts and impinge upon state boundaries and sovereignty. In an age of attempts at ethnic cleansing and brutal civil war, Chadda offers a powerful critique of cultural and territorial nationalism, using the Indian experience to draw conclusions about other ethnic conflicts and the hazards they pose to regional and global stability.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231107372
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	04/09/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 8.99(h) x 0.71(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

What People are Saying About This

Robert L. Hardgrave

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, pressures on multiethnic states have grown and the dangers of transborder ethnic conflict intensified. Chadda's analysis of the Indian experience provides insight, both substantive and theoretical, that should inform our understanding of these challenges throughout the world.

— Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., University of Texas, Austin

Editorial Reviews

Chadda has produced a superb analysis.... Her thesis is that traditional pluralist conceptions of states'search for hegemony and neo-Marxist ideas of communal and class divisions are inadequate to deal with the impact of ethnonationalism, which is a 'highly disruptive force, with immense potential for dissolving sovereign boundaries, precipitating war and intervention, and destroying... established nation-states.'... Using three cases—the struggles in the Punjab, in Cashmere, and between Tamils and others in South India and Sri Lanka—she provides excellent descriptions and relates them effectively to her theoretical ideas.

Choice

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, pressures on multiethnic states have grown and the dangers of transborder ethnic conflict intensified. Chadda's analysis of the Indian experience provides insight, both substantive and theoretical, that should inform our understanding of these challenges throughout the world.

Robert L. Hardgrave