Associate professor, Centre for Policy Research, India
Dr. Nimmi Kurian is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India. Kurian's work has focused on exploring major debates in India's and China's foreign policies, the evolving discourse on redefining security, state-society relations and issues relating to sub-regional governance. Some of the recent themes she has worked on include India's Look-East policy, post-Mao policy shifts in China's regional development; particularly the political thrust given to integrating southwestern China with the extended region and issues of social exclusion in India and China. Kurian received her PhD in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her past publications include Emerging China and India's Policy Options and the co-edited Welfare States and the Future. She is currently working on a new book titled Margins and Mainstreams: Regional Imaginaries in India and China.
Kurian has been part of the Kunming Initiative, or the BCIM (Bangladesh, China, India, Myanmar) Forum, an international Track-II initiative to strengthen regional economic cooperation between the contiguous regions of India's Northeast, China's Southwest, Bangladesh and Myanmar. As part of the team of scholars who conceptualised BCIM in Kunming in 1999, she has been an active participant in the ongoing process to create a bottom-up, inclusive approach to study regional development. These and other related themes form part of a larger study being done by Kurian that looks at marginalisation in the India-China peripheries and explores the potential to mainstream issues of governance, livelihood and resource-sharing.
Contact: nimmikurian@gmail.com
What attracted you to the ICI Fellowship Program?
I see the ICI Fellowship Program essentially as a learning platform that will help nudge participants to think out of set positions and leave the comfort of conventional modes of enquiry. Such open-minded enquiry makes one not only curious as to where such intellectual meanderings would lead but also be more receptive to expect the unexpected as far as research questions are concerned.
What do you hope to explore in this three-country collaborative fellowship program?
I will be interested in understanding the respective approaches of India and China to managing challenges of micro-level governance and ways in which local communities have constantly adopted innovative strategies in the face of growing environmental stress. Growing ecological imbalances in the form of rising temperatures, retreating glaciers, soil erosion and water resource degradation present a shared set of concerns for both countries to collectively tackle. The opportunity of sustained interactions with others thinking actively on this subject could help us explore an alternative analytic framework within which some of these issues can be debated.
Publications
"Kosi as Metaphor: Learning to Unlearnn on Water," an India China Institute exclusive (October 11, 2008).
"Touch of Sunstroke in Singh's Border Vision," Asia Times (February 7, 2008).
"China's Growth Pangs," eSensex World View (August-September 2007).
"It Takes Three to Tango," Hindustan Times (July 5, 2007).
"Troubled Transitions: The Politics of Social Harmony in China," CPR Issue Brief, Centre for Policy Research (India) (2007).
"In Myanmar, Missing the Big Picture," Indian Express (October 15, 2007).
"The Harmony Dilemma," Indian Express (June 2, 2007).
"Fungible Borders and Informal Regionalism: Rethinking China's International Relations," Working Paper (2006)
"Reading China's Border Signals," The Statesman (November 21, 2006).
"Prospects for Sino-Indian Trans-border Economic Linkages," International Studies 42, No. 3-4 (2005): 295-306.
Welfare States and the Future (Palgrave Macmillan 2005). Co-edited with B. Vivekanandan.
Emerging China and India's Policy Options (Lancer Publishers 2001)
More information
Centre for Policy Research home; profile