Recent power shifts have thrown into sharp relief the U.S.-India-China triangular relationship. In the Xi Jinping era, as a bolder China seeks to grow its supremacy in Asia, Beijing’s goals set China in direct opposition to both India and the United States. India, with its own claim to global power, now confronts a reality that sees China’s reaching out for unprecedented influence in the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean, and that casts doubts on the United States’ regional role and presence. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, how is New Delhi navigating this new strategic terrain? What are some of the alternative futures for the U.S.–India-China triangular power-balance game?

On this panel, celebrating the 2017 Shorenstein Journalism Award, the award recipient, Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, will discuss these and other questions, drawing on his career in journalism.

Panelists:

Image

Siddharth Varadarajan is a founding editor of The Wire. He started the online news website in 2015 with cofounders Sidharth Bhatia and M.K. Venu. Previously Varadarajan was the editor of The Hindu. He has taught Economics at New York University and Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, besides working at the Times of India and the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University. He is the editor of a book on the 2002 anti-Muslim violence and co-author of Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (Penguin, 2014). Find him on Twitter at @svaradarajan.

Image

Nayan Chanda is the founder, former editor-in-chief, and current consulting editor of YaleGlobal Online magazine, published by the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. Previously he was as editor-at-large and correspondent with the Hong Kong-based magazine The Far Eastern Economic Review, editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization (Yale University Press, 2007), Brother Enemy: The War After the War, and coauthor of over a dozen books on Asian politics, security, and foreign policy. Chanda is the recipient of the 2005 Shorenstein Journalism Award.

Image

Thomas Fingar is the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a China specialist. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. Previously, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Prior to that, he held multiple positions with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, including assistant secretary, principal deputy assistant secretary, deputy assistant secretary for analysis, director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific, and chief of the China Division. His most recent books are Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2016), and Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011).

Image

Shalendra Sharma is a professor in the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco. He also teaches in the MA program in the Department of Economics and the Center for the Pacific Rim. Sharma is the author of numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and of several books, including China and India in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2009), winner of 2010 Alpha Sigma Nu Book award, and Democracy and Development in India (Lynne Rienner, 1999), winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999. His latest book, A Political Economy of the United States, China, and India: Prosperity with Inequality, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Panel discussion chaired by:

, a visiting scholar with Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. His research is focused on current U.S. foreign and national security policy in Asia and on the foreign policy of Japan and Korea. Sneider was named a National Asia Research Fellow by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Bureau of Asian Research in 2010. His publications include History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (Routledge, 2011), Does South Asia Exist?: Prospects for Regional Integration (APARC, 2010), and First Drafts of Korea: The U.S. Media and Perceptions of the Last Cold War Frontier (APARC, 2009). His writings have appeared in many publications, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, National Review, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Oriental Economist, Newsweek, Time, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, and Yale Global. Prior to coming to Stanford, Sneider was a long-time foreign correspondent.

About the Award:

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. The award, established in 2002, was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2011, Shorenstein APARC re-envisioned the award in recognition of the fact that Asia has served as a crucible for the role of the press in democratization in places such as South Korea, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

 

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

Transnational Islam lacks the centralized leadership and institutions associated with Catholicism. Yet hierarchical and authoritative bodies do make decisions regarding Islam in various contemporary settings, including within the institutional frameworks of states. What happens when Muslim faith and practice are adapted to the terms and procedures of bureaucracy and the modern nation-state?

Dr. Müller will present an original conceptual framework for studying the bureaucratization of Islam. He will apply it to five Southeast Asian cases—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. State bureaucracies in these countries vary widely, but generally they aim to influence or control trends and meanings in local Islamic discourse. Drawing on current debates in the anthropology of the state, with particular reference to Brunei and Singapore, Müller will offer an original analytic framework to explain similarities and differences in bureaucratized Islam in Southeast Asia. Possible implications beyond the region will also be explored.

Dominik Müller

heads the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology’s Research Group on the Bureaucratization of Islam and Its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia. He is also a non-resident fellow in the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Prior positions include visitorships at NUS (2016), the University of Oxford (2015), the University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), and Stanford University (APARC, 2013).  His doctorate in anthropology is from Goethe University Frankfurt (2012).His latest publication is an article on “Hybrid Pathways to Orthodoxy” in Brunei in the April-May 2018 Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, a special issue on bureaucratized Islam that he also guest-edited.