Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Srinath Raghavan is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie India. He is also a professor of International Relations and History at Ashoka University. His primary research focus is on the contemporary and historical aspects of India’s foreign and security policies.
He has written a number of books spanning international relations, strategic studies and modern South Asian history. He has authored War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (2010), and 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (2013), and co-authored Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (2013), India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939 – 45 (2016), and, most recently, The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia (2018).
In addition to writing several notable books, he has also edited Imperialists, Nationalists, Democrats: The Collected Essays of Sarvepalli Gopal (2013) and co-edited (with David Malone and C. Raja Mohan) The Oxford Handbook of Indian Foreign Policy (2015).
His work has also been published in scholarly journals, such as Journal of Strategic Studies, Asian Affairs, and India Review among other academic and policy-focused journals. He is a regular commentator in the media, and currently writes for The Print. His work has appeared in leading Indian publications.
He was awarded the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for his outstanding contribution to strategic studies in 2011 and the prestigious Infosys Prize (Social Sciences) in 2015.
Previously, he was a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was also a senior research fellow at the India Institute at King’s College London and has taught at Defense Studies Department at King’s College London. He has been a member of the National Security Advisory Board. He was the chief editor of the Kargil War History for the Indian Ministry of Defense. Prior to entering academia, he spent six years as an infantry officer in the Indian army.
This article examines whether the concept of a security dilemma is useful in understanding the trajectory of India-China relations over the past seven decades. It claims that the relationship is characterized not by a security dilemma, but by fundamental conflicts of interests.
This book aims to provide a definitive history of U.S. involvement in South Asia. It presents an account of U.S.A.’s political, strategic, economic, and cultural, presence in the region. By illuminating the patterns of the past, this sweeping history also throws light on the challenges of the future.
This article explains why the defense establishment managed to deliver on a Naval project, but not on those of the Army and the Air Force. It analyzes three inter-related issues: institutional capacity within the services, innovation strategy, and project management structures and accountability.
India’s War argues that World War II is crucial to explaining how and why colonial rule ended in South Asia. The book shows how India’s economy, politics, and people, were forever transformed, laying the groundwork for the emergence of modern South Asia.
This book provides an extensive survey of India’s external relations. The book addresses factors in Indian foreign policy, flowing from both history and geography, and also discusses key relationships, issues, and multilateral forums, through which the country’s international relations are refracted.
This book, co-authored with some of India’s leading thinkers and analysts, looks at the threats and challenges India is likely to confront, and the approach it should adopt to pursue national goals and assume its rightful place in the world.
The book argues that the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh can be understood only in the wider international context of the period: decolonization, the Cold War, and incipient globalization. The creation of Bangladesh was far from being a predestined event.
This article looks at how institutional autonomy and assertiveness of the military has progressively increased since 1947. Arguing against conventional wisdom, it contends that the prevailing patterns of civil-military relations have already proved problematic in some key areas of security policy.
By looking at Nehru’s handling of disputes over the fate of Kashmir in 1947-48, the refugee crisis in East and West Bengal in 1950, the Kashmir crisis in 1951, and the boundary dispute with China 1949-62, this book studies Indian foreign policy under Nehru.
This article examines the use of strategic coercion by India. It does so by focusing on India’s use of coercion during the crisis with Pakistan in 2001-02. The article argues that prevalent theses that purport to explain the outcome of coercion don’t provide a satisfactory account of this crisis.
This article argues that the conventional reading of the China crisis of 1962 is, at best, misleading and, at worst, erroneous. Further, it contends that the subsequent war with Pakistan actually underscores the problem of civilian non-involvement in operational issues.