International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

Tracking Hunter-Gatherer Impact on Vegetation in Last Interglacial and Holocene Europe: Proxies and Challenges

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - We review palaeoenvironmental proxies and combinations of these relevant for understanding hunter-gatherer niche construction activities in...     

Liturgy,Constitution, Providence: Brownson and the Revival of a “Thomist” Republicanism

Abstract

This article examines Reinsch's treatment of Orestes Brownson in light of arguments over whether American constitutionalism can withstand post-liberalism.     

‘The land we have we must hold’: soil erosion and soil conservation in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Zealand

Most accounts of the emergence of soil conservation practices in New Zealand have been written by individuals centrally involved in the area. These accounts typically give prominence to the motives and actions of individuals. This paper offers a contrasting viewpoint by discussing developments in soil conservation in terms of some of the elemental functions of states. This perspective reveals how soil conservation in New Zealand emerged out of a ‘war against nature’ linked to colonial land settlement, how in the twentieth century it performed both a social welfare and economic management function, and less obviously how soil conservation was interpreted in terms of national identity.