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The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]

The shift in U.S.-Indian relations around the turn of the twenty-first century provides an ideal opportunity to test competing explanations of global power relations. Through examination of primary and secondary source materials, this paper investigates the timing of and justifications for the rapid changes in the relationship between the United States and India. This evidence is used to test the utility of explanations based on political regime type, extent of economic liberalization, global and local balance of power considerations, and nuclear proliferation concerns in light of changes in U.S.-Indian relations. Although the United States currently has friendly relations with China, this paper finds that the U.S. government is engaging India as a balancer against Chinese power. This suggests that the United States' role as a regional hegemon encourages it to promote a balance of power in Asia, even if the immediate threat of China is arguably minimal, implying that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers feel compelled to intervene in order to remain the sole regional hegemon. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While almost a decade old, Ted Hopf's observation that the democratic peace is an observation in search of a theory still has some validity. In particular, the mechanisms behind the observed lack of war between democracies are poorly understood, making it difficult for scholars to provide a compelling explanation. While there has been some innovative work, particularly with respect to learning and the ability of an increasing number of democracies to cement democratic norms, Müller and Wolff note that normative and structural explanations are monadic explanations for a dyadic phenomenon. Underappreciated in the existing work is the role of identity and the importance this has for driving the democratic peace. With a focus on developing a dyadic democratic peace mechanism and using a case study approach, this paper utilizes the Copenhagen School's securitization framework to examine how identity plays out in the U.S. response to the Indian and Iranian nuclear programs. It finds that in fact identity does play a significant role in how security policy is constructed. The potential implications of this finding, particularly on policy, are significant. If the democratic peace does rely on identity to trigger the constraining norms that limit the escalation of conflict to violence, it is unlikely the democratic peace can be spread by force and it is possible that states nominally democratic can be excluded from the community of democracies if their behavior or significant other aspects of their perceived identity are at variance with the accepted democratic identity standard. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Indian-American citizens' groups in the United States, and the efforts of an increasingly professionalized and well-funded "India lobby" on Capitol Hill, were critical in rallying congressional support around a significant and controversial bilateral nuclear trade and cooperation agreement between India and the United States in 2006. This episode may represent the consolidation of the "India lobby" and portend its emergence as of the most important ethnic communities seeking influence over US foreign policy in the 21st Century. Existing scholarly literature on ethnic lobbies and American foreign policy typically focuses on communities such as Jewish and Cuban Americans (the "Israel lobby," in particular has been the subject of recent contentious academic and policy debates ), and argues that wealth, geographic concentration, and group cohesion are important factors explaining ethnic lobby influence in the US foreign policy process. Indian-Americans as a community broadly fit the first two criteria, but until very recently were highly segmented into particular professional and Indian language/regional associations, and received scant attention in the ethnic lobby literature. Recently, though, the community has become more unified and politically mobilized, with potentially important implications for US policy in South Asia, the broader Asian region, and the world. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]