Third IDSA Annual Conference on South Asia

Speaker Profile: Prof. Rajesh Rajagopalan

Professor Rajesh Rajagopalan teaches International Politics at the Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament, School of International Studies, JNU. He has a PhD from the City University of New York (1998). Previously, he was Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. He also served as Deputy Secretary in the National Security Council Secretariat, Government of India (2000-2001). He has taught at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College of the City University of New York. His areas of research interest are international relations theory, military doctrines, and nuclear weapons and disarmament. He has written two books Fighting Like a Guerrilla: The Indian Army and Counterinsurgency (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008; and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008) and Second Strike: Arguments about Nuclear War in South Asia (New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2005). He has published three occasional papers. Dr Rajagopalan has written extensively in various national and international refereed journals and has published in media.

Abstract

Extra-regional Powers and Emerging Security Scenario in South Asia

The general assumption in much of the literature on regional security is that regional security is a sub-set of global security concerns of extra-regional powers. Regions and regional powers are generally seen as victims or subjects of global power-political machinations. But regional powers have been very adept at using global interests of extra-regional powers to pursue regional interests. Indeed, they have usually been more successful in getting their way than global powers have been at advancing their global agenda at the regional level. South Asia presents good examples of this phenomenon, both during the cold war and after. In essence then, the key driver of extra-regional involvement in South Asia is likely to continue to be the regional security agenda of the local powers much more than that of extra-regional powers.