Description
Despite certain sub-national/ regional shifts in IR, most attempts have been confined to paradiplomacy focussing on a narrow view of the agency of constituent units in terms of either ‘silence’ or ‘defiance’ vis-à-vis the nation-state. Against the continuing preponderance of the nation-state, there have been negligible interventions in IR to examine the co-constitution of the sub-national ‘region’ and the ‘global’. This is a deficit I seek to address using the example of the region of Kerala in southern India. With the world's earliest democratically elected Communist government and limited penetration of Hindutva in electoral terms as opposed to broader India, Kerala has always been a region of scholarly fascination. Combing Sinha’s interpretation of Gourevitch’s outside-inside analysis, Jessop’s work on hegemonic projects and Massey’s studies on space, I argue that a region is a dynamic, contested process forged at the intersection of multiple hegemonic projects advanced by elites constrained/ enabled unequally by immediate global structures. I illustrate this through problematising a specific discourse of Kerala as a problem state, popular in global and national discourse (following the election of the first Communist government from 1957-59), by contextualising this formulation as a hegemonic project against the backdrop of global structural Cold-War exigencies.
