Corridors of Engagement

Swaran Singh| Anita Sengupta| Priya Singh

Asia has re-emerged as a useful case study for exploring the complex relationship between pursuing economic development through trans-state linkages and promoting political agendas through securitisation. New routes and in the process new partners have been sought for creating opportunities for rethinking traditional ways of conceptualising partnerships. However, logistics is as much about institutional setups and the actual corridors through which it operates as the capacity of movement to create new assemblages of power, create identities but also shape the ‘microgeographies’ of everyday life along these corridors of engagement. Mobilities, flows and spaces therefore become significant in understanding the imperatives within which logistics functions as also the occasional resistance and sensitivities that it encounters. Corridors of Engagement engages with this interface of logistics and mobilities in various Asian spaces to underline the significance of these engagements in a wider global context.

Swaran Singh| Anita Sengupta| Priya Singh Swaran Singh engages extensively with Asian affairs with particular focus on China’s foreign and security policy issues, China-India confidence building measures, arms control and disarmament, peace and conflict resolution and India’s foreign and security policy. He is Professor, Centre for International Politics Organization and Disarmament, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Anita Sengupta is an area studies specialist and engages with issues of post-Soviet development, identity politics, migration, gender, borders, critical geopolitics and logistics from an Asian perspective. She is currently Director, Asia in Global Affairs.

Priya Singh is a political scientist. Her research encompasses issues pertaining to nationalism and post-nationalism, identity, state formation, ethnicity, gender, migration, displacement, linkages and disconnects in West Asia in particular but also in a wider Asian context. She is currently Associate Director, Asia in Global Affairs.

Contents

Contributors

Preface

1. The Politics of Connectivity: Geostrategic Perception and Misperception Challenges
Anindya Jyoti Majumdar

2. Semiotic Abstractions and Symbiotic Constructions: Implications of the “OBORisation” for Central Asia
Farkhod Tolipov

3. Political Economy of Chinese Economic Engagements with Small Nations in the Indian Ocean Region: Case of Sri Lanka
Sumanasiri Liyanage and Emesha Piumini Perera

4. Russia: Change of Vision
Oleg A. Donskikh

5. Transcending Post-Colonial Frontiers: Re-envisaging the Grand Trunk Road
Priya Singh

6. Labour Corridors in Eurasia: Mobility and the Gastarbeiter Experience
Anita Sengupta

7. The “Belt and Road” Initiative: “Silk Road Spirit” for Better Cooperation between India and China
B. R. Deepak

8. India’s Engagement with Belt & Road Initiative
Swaran Singh

9. Non-traditional Security in China-India Maritime Cooperation
Zhong Ai