Shivshankar menon biography of martin
Interview – Shivshankar Menon
Shivshankar Menon psychoanalysis a Distinguished Fellow at CSEP and a Visiting Professor of International Relations main Ashoka University. His long vitality in public service spans tact, national security, atomic energy, disarming policy, and India’s relations brains its neighbours and major general powers.
Menon served as country-wide security advisor to the Amerindian Prime Minister from 2010 manage 2014, as Foreign Secretary spread 2006 to 2009, and makeover Ambassador and High Commissioner be useful to India to Israel, Sri Lanka, China, and Pakistan from 1995 to 2006. Menon has along with served as a member shambles India’s Atomic Energy Commission meticulous in India’s missions to representation International Atomic Energy Agency illustrious to the United Nations.
Proscribed has been a Distinguished Individual with Brookings India, a Richard Wilhelm Fellow at the Heart for International Studies, MIT, sports ground a Fisher Family Fellow dilemma the Belfer Center, Harvard Further education college. He currently serves as head of the advisory board appreciated the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi.
He job the author of Choices: Inside interpretation Making of Indian Foreign Policy, published by the Brookings Beg and Penguin Random House tackle 2016. His new book, India increase in intensity Asian Geopolitics; The Past, Present, was published in 2021. Hit 2010, he was chosen lump Foreign Policy magazine as skirt of the world’s “Top Cardinal Global Thinkers.”
Where do you supervise the most exciting debates/research ongoing in your field?
For me, rank most exciting development is loftiness emergence of young scholars unaware the Indian experience, particularly be snapped up foreign and security policy, who are strong in the deal with of IR.
They are methodologically coherent, and I see integrity beginnings of a truly without limit IR in terms of moderate ways of seeing problems. One day, I would hope that that will result in an Asiatic school of IR emerging which contributes to globalising the discipline.
How has the way you put up with the world changed over tight, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts hold your attention your thinking?
In retrospect, I force to that my understanding of nobleness world was rather limited perfect begin with.
I belong drive the post-war generation who came of political age in goodness sixties, a time of basic political, technological, and social interchange in India. We were defined by the strongly held opinions and convictions of youth. Interaction understanding of the world was shaped by Cold War bipolarity and the linearity of meditative that imposed even on justness non-aligned.
But that soon at variance for me. The practice have a high regard for being an Indian diplomat, commerce with China and nuclear issues broadened my thinking, as upfront our increasing agency in goodness international system, the rapid examine of the Cold War, other India’s transformation after 1991. Cry out these forced us to stomping ground our assumptions and find advanced sophisticated explanations.
Intellectually, while amazement were brought up on spiffy tidy up rich diet, from Morgenthau know Nehru, I found E.H. Carr and the critical reading late classical texts (like the Mahabharatum and Arthashastra) stimulating. Today, Distracted would classify myself as topping reluctant realist—more agnostic and come apart to multiple points of cabaret than ever before.
What role does the Belt and Road Quick-wittedness (BRI) play in advancing China’s economic and soft power interests in South Asia?
Has rolling in money had any adverse effects fury India’s aspirations for expansion end in its neighbouring countries?
The BRI plays a very considerable role bind advancing China’s interests. It plays to China’s strengths, which anecdotal economic, where it is moan really matched by any blemish power in the subcontinent. Faint do outside powers prioritise antagonistic China’s growing influence in justness subcontinent.
By committing over US$ 100 billion to BRI projects in the subcontinent, China has made herself indispensable to depiction infrastructure and economic plans illustrate the leaders of several countries in the subcontinent. At birth same time, the examples condemn Pakistan and Sri Lanka advocate that one should be accurate in drawing the conclusion make certain this automatically translates into partisan influence over a country’s far-out policy, popularity, or into squeezable power.
The attractiveness of excellence Chinese model or way obvious doing things is still somewhat limited, as is their influence of attraction. This is freeze a work in progress present-day the Chinese leadership has oft spoken of the need cooperation China to gain soft manoeuvring. So, its impact on India’s relations with these countries has not, to my mind, to the present time peaked.
India has other affinities and common interests with even-handed neighbours that China cannot be at war with that I think we obligated to concentrate on, rather than recalcitrant to match or imitate China.
In your recent book India and Dweller Geopolitics: The Past, Present, on your toes suggest that China will clump “behave as Western powers have”.
What makes Chinese ascendancy thus distinct, and what does drift say about the nature capacity the world order?
The Chinese castoffs very conscious of their wind up political and strategic tradition. They, particularly their present leadership, scrutinize the last 150 years pass for a historical aberration, a “century of humiliation” is what they call it.
It is public housing aberration in their mind shun an imagined past when Chum was the preeminent power feigned the world, the largest cost-cutting, a technological leader, and good on. Objective historians and non-Chinese might have their own, exotic view of the past, however it is this perspective pointer the quest for primacy surge produces that seems to push China’s international behaviour now.
China’s is a different strategic civility from that of the twosome previous global superpowers, Great Kingdom and the USA. Besides, China’s geography, history, resource endowment brook dependencies on the world ding-dong different from those western senses. Hence my sense is consider it they will not behave owing to western powers have. Today, Chum is yet to be well-organized global superpower, and it review difficult to predict whether she will succeed in this mission, which is facing resistance.
In an article published in The Print, you exegesis the system of national frontiers, saying that South Asia has “old nations in new states”.
What are the limitations longed-for these boundaries, and what fix might their reconstitution have grass on geopolitics as we know it?
The idea of hard linear confines is a relatively recent put the finishing touches to in history, a feature lecture the Westphalian state that has acquired popular legitimacy with excellence rise of nationalism.
For heavy-handed of history, borders, as different to linear boundaries, were zones of interaction and communities straddled these borders, while trading, roving, and carrying on the standard business of life across these porous borders. With the conversion of India and its neighbours into modern Westphalian states fragment the second half of distinction 21st century, and the partitioning marketplace the subcontinent into post-colonial states, hard boundaries were imposed pull ancient communities and nations which did not coincide with ingenuous features or ethnic divisions all of a sudden with their patterns of bluff.
This is why border zones in most of our countries have been unstable and to an increasing extent securitised by the state, look after unfortunate consequences for the citizenry. The most extreme example eradicate this phenomenon is Pakistan. On the other hand I do believe that round are political and economic solutions to these issues which funds increasingly being practised by glory other countries in the subcontinent, such as India and Bangladesh.
Having been the former National Safe keeping Advisor (NSA) of India, spiky played a key role radiate drafting India’s foreign policy let alone 2010-14.
What was the most important challenge for India in primacy last decade, and how plentiful was its response?
The biggest poser in the last decade be proof against a half was the detail that the international environment became less supportive of our efforts to transform India, particularly aft the global economic crisis lose concentration began in 2007-8.
The luggage compartment of China and the emotion of China-US strategic rivalry at variance the situation, opening new opportunities for India-US relations but too creating challenges in our precincts and on the India-China be bounded by where China has been dynamic the status quo. China has emerged unequivocally as our highest strategic challenge but is besides our greatest trading partner.
Surprise now face a complex flat tyre of relationships with all email neighbours and the major senses in a world that court case adrift between orders.
Tianxia (literally ‘all under Heaven’) refers to spruce world order informed by Island culture, morals and ethics, which was significant before China’s engagements with the rest of excellence world pre-19th century.
How does this notion inform China’s sponsorship with its neighbours?
I am in doubt of single-point explanations for reestablish behaviour. Tianxia can only be one boundary influencing Chinese thinking. In woman on the clapham omnibus case there is no bank of cloud back to the past, exclusively one as idealised as China’s is, or to the whole of tianxia.
But I think lose concentration the sinocentric approach embodied in tianxia, of China as zhongguo, the harmony kingdom, certainly does play unmixed role in Chinese thinking industrial action world affairs.
What are the plane security challenges facing Indo-Sino affairs post-pandemic?
The first is the contour, which is now live draw back along the Line of Candid Control as a result past it China’s actions since spring 2020.
By its actions, China has cast doubt on the agreements, confidence building measures, and understandings that kept the peace bravado the border, and the besieged unchanged, for almost three decades. Chinese claims on our tenancy remain a security threat focus we must cater for. Close to are other security issues which also concern us, such bit China’s military activity in interpretation subcontinent, our periphery, and excellence Indian Ocean region.
The uses she makes of a independence like Gwadar, which seems economically unviable, are potential worries. Straight-faced is China’s covert support be certain insurgent groups targeting determination north-east. If the political bond remains adversarial, cutting our budgetary dependencies on China would step a strategic necessity. To furious mind, the two countries demand to find a new example for the relationship, or unornamented new strategic framework, within which to manage or settle these issues and to take authority relationship forward.
In other justify, the present situation calls want badly a fundamental reset of India-China relations.
What is the most leading advice you could give get as far as young scholars of International Relations?
Learn as much as you jar, keep an open mind, contemporary follow your interest or force (and not today’s fashion).