LISTENING TO THE STALWARTS

Dear Students,

As you start preparing to join the BA in Global Affairs program of the MA in Diplomacy, Law and Business program at the Jindal School of International Affairs, OP Jindal Global University, I am sharing some resources that you can consult. So everything has to start somewhere and you will see that in your program we start with courses on Theories. So here is a resource where you can hear from the stalwarts whose work defines our field and considered seminal in the field. 

Theory Talks is an interactive forum for discussion of debates in International Relations with an emphasis of the underlying theoretical issues. By frequently inviting cutting-edge specialists in the field to elucidate their work and to explain current developments both in IR theory and real-world politics, Theory Talks aims to offer both scholars and students a comprehensive view of the field and its most important protagonists. I really love this site as it does a first person interview with leading scholars of IR in the world, including Professor Siddharth Mallavarapu (formerly of JNU), Professor Amitav Acharya from our part of the world and Professor Qin Yaqing and Professor Yan Xuetong who are the leading IR scholars from China.

You will notice that many scholars are white men, but in some ways they have been leading the research in IR, which is in many ways a post-War discipline.

On a critical note, I urge you to also note that there are intense debates, albeit on the margins, about the discipline and one strand that I want to highlight is the origins of the discipline. The usual story of IR is told from the end of World War II, but IR has a longer and maybe a darker (no pun intended) history in the work of scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke who were aware of the imperial origins of the discipline. One scholar who has been fighting on the margins is Professor Robert Vitalis, who wasn't of course, interviewed on Theory Talks. But you can find an engaging conversation with him here. 

Here is another resource from E-International Relations, which carries far more interviews from not only the preeminent scholars but practitioners, teachers etc.

And for the first time Professor John Mearshiemer was on India Today along with Kishore Mahbubani and Samir Saran (of Observer Research Foundation).