This chapter extends the analysis in Chapter 6 by examining the origins and consequences of national security institutions in Pakistan from 1947 to 2015. Unlike India, the persistent threat of bureaucratic punishment prevented the emergence of integrated institutions, despite the salient international threats faced by its political leaders. Instead, Pakistan has cycled between siloed and fragmented institutions, with civilian leaders tending to adopt the former and military rulers tending to choose the latter. The chapter argues that the reason for this pattern stems from differences in political agenda. Military leaders have historically pursued ambitious programs to transform Pakistan’s society and economy, which would allow the military to return to the barracks. A medium-n analysis of Pakistan’s institutional performance suggests that siloed and fragmented institutions tended to perform poorly relative to India’s integrated institutions. Process tracing of the 1999 Kargil War illustrates that this poor performance can be attributed to low-quality bureaucratic information upon which Pakistan’s leaders based their choice for conflict.

Chapter Three explores the views of former officials regarding compliance by states with international law. Almost all former officials believed that international law constrains state behavior, at least to some extent, and that states comply with international law much of the time. The top positive factors favoring compliance, as revealed by frequency counts, were reputational concerns; state interest in a stable legal and institutional system; reciprocity, or the prospect of retaliation; ethical considerations, including ethical values underlying international law rules and respect for the rule of law; idiosyncratic factors, including the history and culture of states; and benefits flowing from participation in specific regimes. The significant role of ethical factors gives a boost to normative theories about compliance. The role of systemic interests illustrates the benefits of a multilateral, institutional, and rule-based system. Among the factors militating against compliance, the dominant factor was state interest. Many former officials suggested that decisions about compliance involve a cost–benefit assessment, a consideration of many factors including international law. The chapter concludes by considering the former officials’ perceptions about the reasons that states outside of the United States take into consideration regarding compliance with international law.

In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

Breiner emphasizes Weimar’s role as an exemplar in political thought and focuses specifically on the highly influential political scientist Otto Kirchheimer. His chapter highlights how Kirchheimer viewed the Weimar Constitution as a struggle over conflicting and irreconcilable notions of democracy and society and further ties it to his postwar theory of political opposition and its decline. Breiner uses these discussions to highlight how mainstream American political science have misunderstood these ideas and how they relate to core aspects of the Weimar problematique.

Introduction

India and the Gulf relations have evolved over a period of time, from India being a benign power with transactional interaction with the region to being a pragmatic actor and strategic partner to major Gulf economies. The inclusion of strategic components in the relations started over a decade after the end of the Cold War when India signed a strategic partnership agreement with Iran in 2003. Before that, since 1991, both India and the region had already started to embrace each other by shedding off their ideological differences and protectionist economy and by being lenient on non-alignment Third World concern. This was also the time when India ceased viewing the region through the Pakistani prism. Hence, the elevation of Indo-Gulf relations to strategic partnership level is the outcome of changing geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics, internationally, regionally, and nationally. Strategic relations with the region are crucial for India's economic development, social progress, and political ascendance. With growing defence cooperation and the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, the Gulf's role in building India's defence industry is worth examining. The Gulf's importance in India's strategic calculus far outweighs even the immediate neighbourhood, given the volume and percentage of trade, its contribution to India's energy requirements, and gross domestic product (GDP) through remittances sent by 8.5–10 million Indian expatriates in the region.

Thus, it is undeniable that the Gulf is key to India's growth story. The economic and energy component in the Indo-Gulf relations is dominant since the discovery of oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908 and subsequently in the Arab states. Therefore, what tempted the countries to enter into strategic partnerships and what are the objectives of such partnership warrant a detailed examination. Furthermore, it becomes necessary to inspect what corresponds to a strategic partnership in the Indo-Gulf context. Thus, both a conceptual and contextual understanding of Indo-Gulf relationstransformed to strategic partnerships is unique and is a relevant contribution to the existing literature on the subject.

Strategic partnerships as a concept emerged in the 1990s as an important feature in the evolving international relations systems and discourse. Generally, it is multifaceted and multidimensional in character; however, it does not necessarily mean a unique relationship.

The* Gulf region has been a key employment destination for Indian workers, a major source of remittances and vital trading partner for India. Through an examination of speeches and policies and using constructivist discourse analysis, this chapter seeks to assess the nature and drivers of the strategic narratives of the previous Congress Party–led government of Manmohan Singh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government of Narendra Modi to engage the Gulf states and the Indian diaspora in the Gulf region. It is argued that India's engagement with the Gulf states since the 1990s has been shaped by varying domestic political projects that place emphasis on India's advancement as a market-driven state and society with a secular-social democratic identity, under the Singh government, and an identity of ‘marketised Hindutva’, under the Modi government. The chapter aims to compare the nature of engagement produced by these similar but distinct political projects. It also seeks to highlight the foreign policy impact of the external projection of domestic politics and the impact of foreign policy engagement in shaping domestic political projects.

Introduction

India's current policy towards the Gulf States has been advertised as a reinvention and a distinct move beyond just an economic engagement based on the supply of oil to one that encompasses the security and strategic spheres. There is, however, a certain continuity with previous Indian engagements with Gulf nations. India's foreign policy was first transformed significantly following the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s, with economic security taking centre stage to assist a growing economy. Referring to the Gulf nations as India's ‘natural economic hinterland’, the goal of the Manmohan Singh government was to consolidate sustainable economic partnerships that would pave the way for strategic and political alliances, a direction that the current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued actively. Broadly, India's priorities in the Gulf as identified by several governments have been geared towards energy security, trade, investment, strategic ties, and securing the interests of the large Indian diaspora. Another recurring aspect of India's engagement with the region has been to negotiate a tricky path between the Arab Gulf states, the relationship with Iran and to harbour increasingly closer ties with the Jewish state of Israel.

This pioneering volume provides a systematic treatment of India's Gulf policy from multiple thematic and theoretical angles. It seeks to address the mismatch between the Gulf region's economic and security importance to India and the dearth of academic attention paid to India's Gulf policy. Although several books and articles have been published on India's relations with individual Gulf states, few if any offer systematic treatments of India's Gulf policy as a whole. This volume also seeks to reconcile the study of India's Gulf policy with the disciplinary debates and questions that underpin the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis. While much of the study of India's foreign policy remains atheoretical and isolated from broader theoretical and disciplinary conversations, this volume makes a conscious effort at bridging the divide. The editors have therefore conceived this volume as a collection of theoretically informed treatments of India's Gulf policy. The contributors were asked to consider and discuss the theoretical frames and methods that they employed in analysing the various aspects of India's Gulf policy. The volume, therefore, also serves as a practical guide for students of foreign policy analysis to applying theoretical and methodological tools to foreign policy.

The project was conceived in the course of Hasan T. Alhasan's doctoral work under the supervision of Harsh V. Pant at the India Institute at King's College London. The editors would like to thank the India Institute, the editors at Cambridge University Press, the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and various colleagues including Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad, Dr N. Janardhan, P. R. Kumaraswamy, Dr Melissa Levaillant, and A. K. Pasha for their support and encouragement. Hasan is particularly indebted to HRH Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and the Crown Prince's International Scholarship Programme for the generous financial support of his doctoral studies without which his work on this volume would not have been possible.

This chapter addresses the relationship between the Court and the Commission beyond the printed page. By focusing attention on the movement of members from one institution to the other, and to the customary exchanges in Geneva between the members of both the UN organs, it reveals the extent and contribution of the more subtle ties that bind the Court and the Commission.