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This chapter describes aspects of the transatlantic slave trade specific to regions that now comprise Nigeria and provides a review of academic research since the Second World War on the causes, effects, and character of the trade. Because of its volume, duration, and destabilizing effects, the trade had a profound impact on Nigeria’s political and economic evolution. Modern scholarship has centered around five recurring questions: How large was the trade? How efficient and productive was slave labor relative to free labor? Did the trade catalyze the Industrial Revolution in England? Did the trade retard the long-term economic development of Africa? Why did Africa, as opposed to many other potential source regions, become the New World’s primary provider of slave labor? Despite decades of research and scholarly debate, questions about the economic motives for the transatlantic trade and its long-term effects on Africa’s development remain unsettled.

Bangladesh is the ultimate prize in the subcontinent for Indian foreign policy. To enjoy good relations with the world’s third largest Muslim population would immeasurably strengthen India’s hands in transactions with Pakistan and the Islamic world, undermine the Muslim League’s theory that Hindus and Muslims could never coexist, and stabilize India’s vulnerable north-east with the promise of transit facilities through Bangladesh raising expectations of a boost to the economy. Being embedded in the most sensitive area of India, Bangladesh’s cooperation will also boost India in regard to China and Myanmar. Achieving a state of consistently friendly relations with Bangladesh will, however, take time, given the prevailing vertical division in Bangladesh’s polity and society about the fundamentals of its nationhood.

This chapter shows how areas of the global South have moved from the periphery to the center of academic and policy debates about international security. It argues that speaking about the global South as a singular, uniform unit is fraught with difficulties, analytically and politically, and that areas of the global South are occupying an increasingly central, yet ambivalent and contradictory position, within contemporary international security. On the one hand, the global South appears in the figure of the “weak state” as a major threat. On the other, the global South performs as the “intervener state” by contributing the majority of personnel to peacekeeping missions in the world’s trouble spots. The chapter seeks to capture this contradictory position of being part problem, part solution. It concludes that the global South is likely to continue to occupy a central place within international security and that the contradictions are likely to multiply.

India’s relationship with its eastern neighbours has evolved from pan-Asian romanticism and assertive leadership in the late 1940s and 1950s, to isolation and neglect following its defeat in the 1962 war with China, and finally to a more pragmatic resolve since the early 1990s to seek integration with the region and to benefit from its economic dynamism. But while the economic dimension of India’s ‘look east’ policy remains far from realizing its full potential, a strategic dimension has emerged, namely India’s role as a useful political and diplomatic counterweight to Chinese influence in the Asian security architecture. Another dimension of India’s ‘look east’ policy, its participation in Asian regionalism, has New Delhi pursuing a somewhat passive role under ASEAN’s leadership. The ‘look east’ policy faces new challenges as India must reconcile its role as an emerging power, with its traditional tendency to isolate itself from external economic and geopolitical currents.

This chapter focuses on India’s relations with Nepal. India’s security interests and its Nepal policy have been shaped by historical legacy, geographical imperatives, and regional and global political dynamics. India tried to evolve mechanisms of mutual security arrangements and foreign policy coordination to underline its ‘special relationship’ with Nepal but did not succeed. It was also keen to keep strategically adversarial foreign influences out of Nepal but could not do so fully. India successfully helped Nepal in resolving the latter’s transformational political upheavals, but failed to make Nepal institutionalize the changes. India’s failures in Nepal resulted from a lack of long-term policy perspective, interventionist and insensitive diplomatic behaviour, diversity of domestic stakeholders, and the role of aggressive external players like China, Pakistan and the United States. India’s future challenges in Nepal can be met through a stable and forward-looking Nepal as well as a resilient regional policy of India.

India’s most difficult foreign policy challenge has been Pakistan. At one level, the relationship has been managed reasonably well given the fundamental contradiction between India’s status quo-ist approach on Kashmir and Pakistan’s determination to alter the status quo. At another, Indian policy-makers’ inability to meet the challenge effectively reflects the constraints imposed by major policy choices. Jawaharlal Nehru opted for a set of ‘independent’ strategic and economic policies that congealed into ‘non-alignment’ and ‘self-sufficiency’. This left India militarily and economically weak and unable to counter Pakistan’s sustained bid to wrest Kashmir. A later set of choices encompasses failure to anticipate the consequences of Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear capability, reluctance to match Islamabad’s asymmetric strategy of pressurizing India, and a tendency to slip back into the autonomy-oriented policy template of the Cold War era. Consequently, India’s capacity to fashion an optimal policy towards Pakistan continues to be significantly constrained.

This chapter provides an overview of India–Sri Lanka relations since the dawn of independence. Being a small country, bordering on a colossus, it is natural that Sri Lanka should entertain fears about the intentions and objectives of its northern neighbour. Very often, the Sinhalese elite, in order to limit Indian influence, tries to involve external powers, which contribute to the worsening of India–Sri Lanka relations. Significant highlights in the chapter include: problems of stateless people, delimitation of the maritime boundary, New Delhi’s policy towards ethnic conflict, the India–Sri Lanka Accord and the 13th Amendment, the refugee phenomenon, the travails of fishermen, and India–Sri Lanka economic cooperation. The full potential of India–Sri Lanka relations can be accomplished only when the ruling elite view geography as an opportunity and not as a hindrance.

This chapter discusses India’s role in the Indian Ocean and the role that the Indian Ocean plays in Indian foreign policy. In effect this represents a ‘look south’ policy for developing India’s sea power in its extended neighbourhood. Six sections look in turn at India’s official frameworks, geopolitics and geoeconomics, location and oceanic holdings, blue-water naval projective capabilities, diplomatic position in the Indian Ocean, and relations with extra-regional powers. The chapter concludes by looking beyond the present into the near future where India will probably maintain and extend its regional pre-eminence, but will face the challenge of maintaining required financial outlays. It also concludes by looking at the implication for India and the Indian Ocean of ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategic formulations.

Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy illustrates realist theory in being more attuned to power relations and pragmatic solutions than to moral principles or liberal institutions. Throughout her two tenures in office she manoeuvred successfully to an improved status, especially when dealing with the Bangladesh crisis. Had Mrs Gandhi been a ‘hard realist’ she might have effectively curtailed Pakistan’s capacity to make mischief. She could have used India’s regional dominance to build a South Asian community and formulate a strategy for the adjacent Persian Gulf. She did not do so, and her domestic policy blunders led to her downfall in 1977. On her return to power she did not disrupt India’s beneficial ties with the Soviet Union, tried to mend relations with China, and took steps to strengthen India’s ties with the United States. She hosted several high-level international conferences but her domestic political blunders, as in Punjab, ultimately cost her life.

This article elaborates the role of Intergovernmental Organizations (IO) in domestic social policy. It concentrates on the welfare state in countries which are democratic and economically relatively developed. It describes those IOs which are most relevant for national welfare states in developed nations: the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the International Labour Organization (ILO). The descriptions of these IOs focus on their organizational structures and systems of decision-making, and on their official goals and tasks. It then covers the modes and means by which IOs attempt to have an impact on national welfare states. Finally, it examines the influence of IOs on national welfare states, the strategic interactions between IOs and domestic political actors, and the question of soft versus hard law.

This chapter traces and analyzes the course of the Arab–Israeli conflict from its early days to the present. What began as a Jewish–Arab conflict in and over Palestine developed in 1948 into a larger conflict between Israel and the Arab world. The conflict festered in the 1950s and culminated in the war of June 1967. That war had two major contradictory results. First, it provided Israel with bargaining chips for negotiating peace with Arab countries that lost territory in the Six-Day War. Most significantly, this led to the signing of the Israeli–Egyptian peace treaty in 1979. But second, it also encumbered Israel with the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the lingering control of a large Palestinian population. To a great extent the larger Arab–Israeli conflict was telescoped into the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in its present form. In recent years two other contradictory developments have been shaping the Israeli–Arab landscape. The return of Iran and Turkey into the Middle Eastern arena has added an important Islamic dimension to the conflict. But Iran’s quest for regional hegemony and the exacerbation of Sunni–Shiite tensions in the Middle East have had a moderating effect on the attitude of the Sunni Arab states toward Israel.

The Israel-Diaspora relationship is characterized by mutual identity construction. Israel depends on the Diaspora for material and ideational support; some corners of the Diaspora draw on Israel to underwrite its ongoing project of identity construction and maintenance, while others see the State of Israel as a safe haven in the face of anti-Semitism. Twenty-first-century Diaspora Jewish politics is animated by increasingly intense debates over Zionism, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, the question of evolving attachment to Israel (and the meaning of the concept of attachment itself), and the place of Israel in collective Jewish consciousness through donor-supported programs such as Birthright. The Israel lobby, particularly in the United States, provides a stark institutional manifestation of many of these dynamics, with respective foreign policies toward Israel serving as flashpoints for various Jewish electoral and identity debates.

Israel’s theory and practice in the conflict with the Palestinians since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise reveals continued striving for secure and exclusive Jewish national territorial sovereignty over historic Palestine while disregarding Palestinians’ collective political rights and claims to the same territory. Nonetheless, changing regional and international constraints brought Israeli decision makers to shift their strategies in coping with the Palestinian political/military challenges to the country’s security and international legitimacy. This chapter analyzes Israel’s shifting policies toward the Palestinians, from long-term denial and military responses to negotiated agreements and tense coexistence with a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the 1993 Oslo Accords. Since that period, however, the collapse of the Oslo process in the year 2000 and consequent Palestinian uprising, the increased role of religion in the conflict on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, Israel’s insistence on continuing its overall domination of the Palestinian territories, and the stalemated diplomatic process all underline the narrowing options for bringing this conflict to any peaceful end.

Zionism set out not only to establish a state of the Jews, but also to create a Jewish society, one profoundly different from the ones the immigrants had been born into. The genocide of the Nazis, the abandonment of internationalism by the Soviet Union, and the hostility of Arab nationalism moved Zionism toward a position more concerned with national survival. Israel was forced to abandon a nonaligned status after 1950 and, when diplomatically isolated after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to cultivate relations with regimes that were considered pariah states, such as South Africa, Chile, and Argentina. The ascendancy of the Israeli Right after 1977 accentuated this approach. The demise of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s all contributed to the establishment of diplomatic relations with major states such as India and China and Arab neighbors such as Jordan, as well as to unofficial contacts with others such as Cuba. In the twenty-first century many states relegated ideology to a secondary position, assisting Israel’s policy of survivalism.

Israel has responded to the uniquely harsh strategic environment it has faced ever since its establishment by developing defensive capabilities totally disproportionate to its size and has become a regional power, its existence no longer truly in doubt. Nevertheless, Israel continues to face the severe threats of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, rockets, and cyberattacks, primarily from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas; the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians; and demographic challenges. This article presents both the fundamental changes that have taken place in Israel’s strategic environment, from conventional, state-based threats to primarily asymmetrical ones, and the responses it has developed to date. It also addresses Israel’s relations with the United States and other primary international actors, as well as Israel’s nuclear and regional arms control policy.

This chapter discusses Israel’s policy in and toward the West Bank (and East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip from the Six-Day War (1967), when Israel occupied these areas, to the present. Although the focus here is on the political-security realm, other spheres (e.g., economic, social, and cultural-discursive) are also addressed. The first part of the chapter discusses Israel’s policy in and vis-à-vis the Territories in the first decade after 1967, which in retrospect was the policy’s formative period. It then examines the four decades that followed, identifying elements of continuity and change in Israel’s policy. This is followed by a discussion of the major challenges to Israel’s policy since 1967: the first Palestinian intifada, the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, the second intifada, and Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The concluding section tries to assess the cumulative impact of Israel’s policy in and toward the Territories.

The history of Israel is framed by wars. However, the nature of Israel’s wars has changed over time, from mainly infantry-based warfare to modern armor warfare, and from conventional warfare to regular armies clashing with nonstate combatants, known in the professional literature as low intensity conflict (LIC). Conventional warfare took place within a clear and well-defined territory, with relative separation between civilians and soldiers. Low intensity conflict has blurred the battlefield boundaries, and armed operations take place in civilian areas. With these changes, the meaning of victory has changed as well. The decisive military victory that marked the military campaigns of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 is no longer relevant in the LIC battlefield. Conquest of territory and destruction of the enemy’s military forces, the hallmark of victory during the days of the conventional wars, are much less important in a mode of fighting in which the image of being able to continue to inflict damage is much more important.

Fifty years of occupation of the Palestinian territories, changes in the nature of warfare, demographic developments, and transformation of the civilian value system have all resulted in deepening the gap between civilian society and the military in Israel over the past two decades. The military is well aware of the impact of these factors and of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) deteriorating status in society. Indeed, the chief of the general staff has even portrayed these issues as more serious than the external threats posed by Israel’s enemies. Thus, the military has implemented a series of mechanisms aimed at reducing the gap, dealing with the expectations of civilian groups, reconstructing the military structure and normative code, and even introducing a new model of conscription, all in order to renew its contract with civilian society. What will be the repercussions of these steps, and what are the various scenarios for future developments in civil-military relations in Israel?

This chapter examines the trajectory of Nigeria’s engagement with the Commonwealth since independence, and how domestic politics and pressures, foreign policy priorities, and shifting international politics have shaped Nigeria’s influence through the Commonwealth, and how the Commonwealth in turn has influenced Nigeria. It argues that Nigeria’s ability to be strategic in its engagement as a key member state has been stymied by governance challenges at home and increasing competition from other African states as they have made gains in development and democracy. Yet Nigeria retains prominence and influence through the involvement of key individuals in the work of the Commonwealth, and since its return to civilian rule in 1999 and re-entry into the Commonwealth after its four-year suspension, has aligned with Commonwealth principles.

China’s relations with Nigeria have accelerated since the 2000s, which is linked to the rise of China as a global player, its exponential economic growth and its consumption of raw materials. The material foundations upon which links have been built with China have served to reify Nigeria’s dependent position in the global economy and bear the hallmarks of an unbalanced and exploitative relationship. This fact is now recognized by many Nigerian commentators within civil society and the policymaking elites. The structural nature of Nigeria’s dependent relations with China is becoming more apparent: its trade profile with China is characterized by a lopsided dependence on the export of raw materials, and the import of manufactured goods. Since independence, the ruling cliques within Nigeria have overseen a progressive deepening of dependency on mineral products, resulting in oil and gas becoming the be-all and end-all of Nigerian economic (and thus political) life.