Kate Sullivan

Kate Sullivan

University of Oxford, Director of South Asian Studies

International Relations of South Asia, The Politics of South Asia, India rising Power, India’s Identity 

Biography

Professor Kate Sullivan (University of Oxford, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies) originally joined the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme as a departmental lecturer in October 2010. In September 2017 she took up Oxford’s Associate Professorship in the International Relations of South Asia, a joint post between Area Studies and the Department of Politics and International Relations. She was Course Director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies in 2018-19 and Director of CSASP from 2018-2021. She hold a Governing Body Fellowship at St Antony’s College. Her research centres on India’s identity and state behaviour as a rising power. Her book, Rising India: Status and Power (2017), with Rajesh Basrur, looks at India’s status-seeking strategies in world politics since Independence. From 2013 to 2015 she led a collaborative research project that examined India’s rise from the perspective of a number of significant non-Western states, resulting in the edited volume Competing Visions of India in World Politics: India’s Rise beyond the West (2015). From 2015 to 2017 Manjari Chatterjee Miller and she developed an international research network focussing on India’s foreign policy under the post-2014 government, leading to our joint-editorship of the special issue of International Affairs, ‘India’s Rise at 70’ (January 2017). Her research has been supported by the John Fell OUP Research Fund and the Vice Chancellor’s Returning Carer’s Fund. Currently, she is working on a monograph that examines how rising powers navigate and negotiate socialisation pressures in order to retain distinctive elements of their identities. As an Associate Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, she is also collaborating with Rahul Roy-Chaudhury, Senior Fellow for South Asia, on a broad-ranging and policy-relevant project on Indian Ocean security. More broadly, she is interested in South Asian nuclear politics, and India’s and Pakistan’s approaches to institutions of global governance. Teaching and supervising are two of the most rewarding and illuminating aspects of her work. Her DPhil students are working on topics such as Nehruvian critiques of International Relations theory, nuclear politics, and the sociology of the Indian Foreign Service. She convenes the MSc/MPhil option The International Relations of South Asia, and co-convenes the option India as a ‘Great Power’. She also serves as Course Provider for the undergraduate PPE option The Politics of South Asia. She gained a Teaching Excellence Awards Project Grant in 2013 and was nominated by her students for an Oxford University Students Union Teaching Award in 2017. She engages regularly with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and has appeared on an India-focused edition of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week.

Publications

Books

  • Rising India: Status and Power (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017) (with Rajesh Basrur)
  • Competing Visions of India in World Politics: India’s Rise Beyond the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) (edited volume)*

Edited Collections

  • India in International Affairs, Virtual Issue, International Affairs, January 2017
  • India: A Rising Power at 70, Special Issue, International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 1, 2017 (with Manjari Chatterjee Miller)

Articles

  • ‘China’s and India’s search for international status through the UN system: competition and complementarity’, Contemporary Politics, DOI: 10.1080/13569775.2019.1621718, (with Rosemary Foot), 2019

  • ‘India, the Indo-Pacific and the Quad’, Survival, Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 181-194 (with Rahul Roy-Chaudhury), 2018
  • ‘Between Conformity and Innovation: China’s and India’s Quest for Status as Responsible Nuclear Powers’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 482-503 (with Nicola Leveringhaus), 2018
  • ‘Continuity and Change in Indian Grand Strategy: The Cases of Nuclear Non-proliferation and Climate Change’, India Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 33-64 (with Manjari Chatterjee Miller), 2018
  • India’s Odyssey through International Affairs’, International Affairs, Virtual Issue, January 2017, doi: 10.1093/ia/iix026
  • ‘Pragmatism in Indian Foreign Policy: How Ideas Constrain Modi’, International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 1, 2017, pp. 27-49 (with Manjari Chatterjee Miller)
  • ‘Introduction – India: a Rising Power at 70’, International Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 1 (2017), pp. 1-6, 2017 (with Manjari Chatterjee Miller)
  • ‘Trustworthy Nuclear Sovereigns? India and Pakistan after the 1998 Tests’, Stosunki Międzynarodowe – International Relations, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 289-306. (with Nicholas J. Wheeler)*
  • Exceptionalism in Indian Diplomacy: The Origins of India’s Moral Leadership Aspirations’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2014, pp. 640-655*
  • ‘Discourses on the Nuclear Deal: Persistence of Independence’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLIII, No. 3 (19-25 January, 2008), pp. 73-76*

Book Chapters

  • ‘Understanding India’s Exceptional Engagement with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime’, in: Johannes Plagemann, Sandra Destradi and Amrita Narlikar (eds), India Rising: Ideas, Interests and Institutions in  Foreign Policy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), forthcoming.

  • ‘Chinese and Indian Competitive Nuclear Restraint in the Global Nuclear Order’, in: Kanti Bajpai, Manjari Miller and Selina Ho (eds), Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations(Abingdon: Routledge) (with Nicola Leveringhaus), forthcoming.

  • ‘India’s Ambivalent Projection of Self as a Global Power: Between Compliance and Resistance’, in: Kate Sullivan (ed.) Competing Visions of India in World Politics: India’s Rise Beyond the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 15-33*
  • ‘Introduction: Creating Diversity in Readings of India’s Global Role’, in: Kate Sullivan (ed.) Competing Visions of India in World Politics: India’s Rise Beyond the West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1-14*
  • ‘Democracy Promotion and the Problem of Peaceful Coexistence: Exploring the ‘Democratic Diplomacy’ of India’, in: Jyotirmaya Tripathy and Sudarsan Padmanabhan (eds.), Democracy and Cultural Diversity (London/New Delhi: Routledge, 2013), pp. 141-164* 

Other Research Publications

  • ‘Is India a Responsible Nuclear Power?’ Policy Report – S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (March 2014)*

Media/Online Publications

NB: Asterisked publications appear under my former name, Kate Sullivan