Description
The proposed aims to put forth a detailed mapping of populist foreign policies in South Asia, with a focus on India, Maldives and Pakistan. It aims to contribute to the limited , but growing literature on populism, and foreign policy.Conceptually, I adopt a poststructural conceptualization of foreign policy as a site for the constitution of difference along the lines of the domestic/ external and self/other (Campbell 1992), and build on its intersections with populism as political logic(Laclau 2005)
The case of India, Maldives and Pakistan are interesting case studies situated in South Asia. While India, still has been the focus of the growing scholarship on populism, and populist radical right, Pakistan remains limited to few studies examining it as a case of Islamist civilizational populism, and Maldives remains on the margins of the research on both the scholarship on populism, and on populist foreign policy. In the case of BJP, and India, I will select the year 2014 ( and overall focus on the period 2014-2024) as this marks the year, when BJP under the leadership of Prime minister Modi came to power. In the case of Maldives the focus will be on 2013- 2024, as this allows me as researcher to study the differing dynamics of the India Out, and India first campaign deployed by all three different political regimes. For the case of Pakistan, I will focus on Imran Khan and PTI (2018-2024). In order to study all these three cases within the identified time frames, the proposed study will be grounded in an discursive analysis of Populist Right Publications
