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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates goods ? such as admission into universities, jobs, promotions, public contracts, business loans, and rights to buy and sell land ? on the basis of membership in a designated group, for the purpose of increasing the proportion of members of that group in the relevant labor force, entrepreneurial class, or university student population, where they are currently underrepresented as a result of past or present discrimination. The programs involved vary substantially across countries, regarding the identification of their intended beneficiaries (ethnic, national, or racial groups held to be economically or socially disadvantaged, aboriginal peoples, women, people with disabilities, war veterans?), the form of the programs involved (quota/non-quota), the level of the legal norms from which they derive (constitutional, legislative, administrative), and their domain of implementation (whether restricted to the public sector or not). Drawing from previous research on the United States (« Judicial Uses of Subterfuge: Affirmative Action Reconsidered », Political Science Quarterly, 18 (3), 2003, p. 411-436) and France (« Affirmative Action at Sciences Po », French Politics, Culture, and Society, 20 (3), 2002, p. 52-64), the paper will compare affirmative action programs in the United States, India, Malaysia and South Africa, considering each of these four parameters and the relations between them. It will focus both on the intended results and on the different side effects of the policies and of the justifications advanced on their behalf. In particular, I shall argue that in India and Malaysia, reducing the inequality in the distribution of social goods between the different groups involved is not conceived as partaking of the more utopian project of reducing the saliency of group boundaries within the nation-state. Giving communities their proportional share of social benefits is not supposed to lead to the blurring of the lines that keep them separate from each other in private, non-allocative spheres. In the United States and in South Africa, on the other hand, the connection between affirmative action policies equalizing patterns of economic distribution among various ascriptive groups and the ideal of societal integration is a much stronger one. This is reflected in the definition of the social outcome whose attainment would justify the eventual termination of affirmative action programs. In India and Malaysia, the proportionality criterion provides an obvious « focal point » in this respect, generally acknowledged as such. In the United States ? and, to a lesser extent, in South Africa ?, proportional representation is emphatically rejected as a distributive principle, even though it arguably operates covertly at the policymaking level, by providing the benchmark against which « discrepancies » and « deficiencies » will be identified and compensated for. Last but not least, the paper will distinguish among affirmative action regimes according to their degree of internal differentiation, attempting to account for the highly specific configuration found in India, where members of the group generally considered as the most disadvantaged ? the Untouchables ? are being granted some kind of preferential treatment also in relation to the policy?s other beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores recent U.S. initiatives to conclude arms control agreements as well as confidence-building measures (CBMs) between India and Pakistan and assesses the prospects for progress in these areas. After U.S.-led negotiations in the wake of the 1998 India-Pakistan nuclear tests, India and Pakistan expressed renewed interest in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty (FMCT). In contrast, U.S. efforts to convince India and Pakistan to adopt the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and to disarm have failed. Since January 2001, the Bush administration has continued to promote CBMs and Nuclear Risk Reduction Measures (NRRMs) between the two countries. Since 2002, the administration considered offering missile-defenses to Pakistan and India, which might improve conditions for arms control and reduction. Indian officials have expressed interest in missile defense and noted the links with arms reduction. However, Pakistan and its ally, China, suspect that U.S. and Indian missile defenses are intended to neutralize their deterrents, which could open the door to an accelerated arms race and even preemptive action. A contradiction explored in the paper is that, while the United States tries to negotiate arms control agreements in South Asia, it has moved away from the ABM treaty, the CTBT, and other arms control measures. Another issue is what the United States can achieve as a mediator through arms control and CBMs, such as cooperative aerial monitoring, a more rigorous ‘hot line,’ and a cooperative threat reduction (CTR) program. A related issue that is explored is the connection between arms control and missile defenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often imagine that countries with nuclear energy programs are nuclear weapons states waiting to happen. Yet there are multiple ways that states can enhance their nuclear security, even when they possess the requisite technology for a weapons program. They may undertake diplomatic efforts to reduce the level of threat, they may seek shelter under an ally's nuclear umbrella, and they may adopt unilateral military measures, up to and including the development of a nuclear arsenal. Over the past five decades, India has engaged in all three of these approaches. Since India's pursuit of nuclear weapons is already well-documented, this article focuses on its efforts to elicit nuclear restraint from other states through diplomacy and to seek the protection of nuclear-armed allies. Drawing on archival documents and interviews in New Delhi and Mumbai, it documents how Indian leaders eventually became disillusioned with these two alternatives to nuclear armament. In doing so, it depicts India's emergence as a nuclear power not simply as a response to regional threats, but also as the result of dissatisfaction with alternative paths to nuclear security. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this finding for possible U.S.-Indian cooperation in nuclear energy in the future. ..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]

Since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests of May 1998, a considerable scholarly literature has compared deterrence in South Asia with the historical U.S.-Soviet context, illuminating similarities as well as important differences. However, one potentially fundamental difference has not been sufficiently scrutinized: recent India-Pakistan crises have played out under a deepening U.S. engagement in South Asia, whereas the Cold War superpowers had no comparable recourse to third-party intervention. Though the possibility of intervention may help stabilize the regional deterrent balance, it might also have the opposite effect: either Pakistan or India--or both--may have incentives to exaggerate their confrontational intentions (through bellicose rhetoric or low-level force use) in order to raise American fears of a nuclear war, in the hope that U.S. intervention might lead to an outcome more favorable to their regional interests. The potential danger of such a strategy is that neither of the principals can neatly compartmentalize the audience for its conduct: rhetoric or action intended to raise the stakes for the U.S. may inadvertently cross an ill-defined "red line" for the adversary, and thus trigger an escalatory response. This paper will argue that South Asian deterrence is a dynamic situation in which both principles have experimented with escalation, at least in part, to "scare Uncle Sam"--Pakistan in the 1999 Kargil War, and India in a 2001-02 major military mobilization along the international border--only to see the strategy backfire and the U.S. intervene in ways that temporarily limited rather than expanded their strategic options. It will also examine the relevance of Timothy Crawford's concept of "pivotal deterrence" to the contemporary South Asian context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how domestic politics influenced the July 2005 agreement between India and the United States for civilian nuclear technology transfers to India. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we suggest new measures that gauge how district level party systems can be aggregated to the national level within a country. These can be used as measures of party linkage across districts. The degree of party linkage, which is the extent to which parties are uniformly successful in wining votes across districts, is an important but neglected issue to understand the nature of national level party system formation. We build on the party system inflation index introduced by Cox (1999), which measures the inflation from the district level to the national level party system size that occurs in the process of party system aggregation. We show that the Cox measure has undesirable properties and offer alternative measures. We first examine the concept of party linkage, followed by the discussion of Cox’s inflation index and its limitations. We then introduce our suggested inflation measures, and compare them with the Cox index by numerical simulation. We then apply our measures to the cases of Germany, India, Italy and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today everyone knows that in the coming century India, like the Medici, has the intention and potential to enhance its wealth, prestige, and power.In this context, observers of world politics are wondering: How will India pursue those intentions? What will it do to realize its potential and assure its security? In the last year and half since the proposed Indo-US nuclear deal was announced, numerous experts have tried to induce answers to these questions from what is still a small universe of cases including India's attitude toward Iranian nuclear policy and energy (particularly pipeline) policy, toward US missile defense initiatives, toward the enlargement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, toward Chinese activity in South Asia (particularly vis-à-vis Pakistan and Nepal). But, above all, observers have focused on a proposed deal between the US and India on nuclear cooperation.The dimensions and general features of the arena in which India will act are clear. It is a triangular space with China, India, and the US at the corners. The view that a rising India will be the fulcrum of balance in Asia is now increasingly common. A 2004 editorial in the Chinese People's Daily is a good example. "Steadily warming India-US relations have resulted in widespread attention to the geopolitics of Asia. It is difficult to predict whether or not India will become a strategic ally of the US or of China, but the sudden attractiveness of India will sooner or later alter the regional balance of power between the three countries" (Joseph, 2004). The 2005 Indo-US deal was interpreted by many observers to be an obvious American effort to draw India onto the US bandwagon.In the real world, of course, actors are motivated and constrained by power, wealth, and prestige. Syncretic approaches such as the currently fashionable "analytic eclecticism" draw selectively on all three international relations traditions in rendering "explanatory sketches" of important international security questions such as the durability of US-South Korean alliance, the possible revisionist aspiration of a rising China, or whether it is international institutions rather than balance of power dynamics that are shaping strategy in South East Asia. Explaining the future direction of Indian strategy within the China-India-US triangle is as analytically demanding a problem as one is likely to find in contemporary international relations.The conclusion I draw from what follows is that India is very unlikely to balance or to get on the bandwagon. Equipoise is the policy dictated by India's geography, power capabilities, identity, and potential to be a robust actor in global and regional politics. Like the old and now discredited Indian grand strategy of nonalignment, equipoise shuns formal alliances. The term draws on the realist balance of power idiom to identify an alternative stance - neither balancing nor bandwagoning - that is in dynamic equilibrium. That equilibrium is struck between domestic and international dynamics; balancing contradictory domestic cultural and political forces (such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism, self-sufficiency/trade-optimism) and international appeals and threats (such as American democratic/technological/commercial affinity, American unilateral neo-Imperialism, Chinese commercial appeal, and Chinese threatening intrusion/pressure). ..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]