The United Nations
The UN was designed to work only when the great powers agree, and it has done exactly that. Reform proposals all founder on the…
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Study Notes
Everything published under Study Notes on Anantam IAS, newest first.
3454 articles
Evolution of the International Economic System
Bretton Woods was designed to let states pursue full employment without beggaring their neighbours. Everything since has been an argument about whether that bargain…
The Changing International Political Order
The system has run through bipolarity, a unipolar interval and an unsettled present. The useful question is not what to call the present but…
Key Concepts in International Relations
These are the working tools of the paper. Each is contested, and the contest is usually between a narrow military definition and a broader…
Approaches to the Study of International Relations
Every IR theory is an answer to one question: what does anarchy make states do? Realists say compete, liberals say cooperate under the right…
Globalisation: Responses from Developed and Developing Societies
Globalisation produced convergent economic policy and divergent political reactions, and the backlash has come from the societies that designed it as much as from…
Politics of Representation and Participation
Parties, groups and movements are three answers to the same question: how do dispersed preferences become political force? Each answer is failing differently, which…
The State in Comparative Perspective
The same word covers a welfare state, a party-state and a post-colonial state that governs unevenly across its own territory. Comparing them requires asking…
Comparative Politics: Nature, Scope and Approaches
Comparison is not a subject but a method, and its problems are methodological: too many variables, too few cases, and units that are not…
Electoral Politics and Electoral Reform
The Election Commission solved the problem it was designed for, conducting free polls at enormous scale, and has limited purchase on the problems that…
Regionalism, Communalism and State Politics
India has accommodated almost every regional demand it could translate into a constitutional form, and fought almost every one it could not. The record…
Social Movements
Movements are the part of Indian democracy that operates between elections. Their measure is not whether they won their immediate demand but whether they…