Search

The article analyses the reasons and the effects of the rise of digital platforms in India, specifically focusing on SVOD platforms. The proliferation of various digital video platforms of different types has been tremendous both in India and the world since early years of 21st century. Taking into consideration the fact that digitality in India is a recent phenomenon, the article, by drawing upon some of the most significant theories in new media studies analyzes the questions of remediation and mediatization in the context of streaming culture in India by taking an example of an emergent media form - web series. The article also takes into consideration the impact of infrastructural development of streaming culture in India, and looks at several examples illustrating digital revolution in India - the remediation of television and the regulation of SVOD content as an example of entanglement of media and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following decades of relative isolation, China and India have become the world's largest new traders. In this paper, we focus on their Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). While the two economies initially followed similar paths, with a growing number of PTAs signed in the first decade of the 21st Century, since 2011 India has taken a U-turn and stopped completing them. China, on the other hand, has widened and deepened its trade agreements. We present a novel theoretical framework to analyze international economic negotiations by emerging economies and use it to study the puzzling divergence of the trade policies of China and India. By adapting the two-level game framework to emerging economies, we argue that there are key differences in the political economies of countries like China and India (compared to Western industrialized ones), which requires a more specific focus on the domestic side of the two-level game. We show that accounting for non-legislative domestic ratification processes and for iterative games and experiential learning by domestic actors are crucial in understanding the trade strategies of emerging economies. While much of the literature explains large emerging economies by looking at external systemic factors, we instead suggest that their domestic politics trumps international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other issue has influenced the India–Pakistan relationship more adversely than the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. To understand the discourse surrounding the dispute, and how it has evolved within the foreign policies of both countries, this research undertakes a critical discourse analysis of both countries' official statements at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 1948 and 2020. The findings of this study are crucial to not only understanding how the two states have been internationalizing the Kashmir dispute but also what lessons can be learned from the past as both countries attempt to slowly reengage with one another. Our analysis points to the fact that both India and Pakistan's stances on the Kashmir dispute, despite their varying phases throughout the conflict, have essentially remained the same. We argue that, despite seeming to have converged toward some form of resolution during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the current context of India–Pakistan relations presents a worsening trajectory that has not been witnessed since their last major war in 1971. In highlighting the cyclical, almost scripted nature of this debate, this paper attempts to suggest ways to break free from age-old tropes and help pave the way toward more meaningful ways to redefine the issue in light of a radically altered geo-political context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the nexus between the International Peace Architecture (IPA) and the Eastphalian Peace. The IPA subsumes ideas, norms, legal frameworks and institutions established for the purpose of maintaining international peace. The Eastphalian Peace encompasses phenomena associated with the rise of Asian powers such as China and India in their efforts to maintain or reform the IPA to meet the challenges of peacebuilding, statebuilding and development assistance in the twenty-first century. This article examines the contributions made by China and India to the IPA and analyses how the emergence of the Eastphalian Peace would impact on Stage Six of the IPA which is supposed to connect Peace with Global Justice (PGJ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rio Tinto had been developing a diamond mining project in Madhya Pradesh for a decade when in 2017 it hastily abandoned the project. We analyse this counterintuitive exit through an ethnographic approach nested within a qualitative case study framework. We argue that the exit was caused by multi-scalar politics. Local protests over livelihood and labour issues –pre-emptively rearticulated by regional civil society groups through an ecological 'framing' – led to litigation. The national forest bureaucracy posed regulatory hurdles, and a change in the national political regime in 2014 brought to power a party that leveraged national capital of a certain variety, which weakened Rio Tinto's political position. Lastly, a slump in the global diamond market created economic uncertainties, finally leading to its exit. It has not, however, deterred the government from facilitating investment by Indian mega-corporate houses in mining diamonds, once again ignoring local dissent. Under the current regime in India, the space for activism is increasingly restricted, and that restriction, we contend, can lead to the disarray in strategising alliances and goals between ecological and social justice concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]