Events

TAPSA: Organizing Mistrust: How India’s Leaders Navigate Bureaucratic Resistance on Foreign Policy

Thursday, October 10, 2024 – 5pm, Foster 103

Emily Tallo, PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago 

Bureaucratic competencies—technical and regional expertise, specialized skills, information provision, and institutional knowledge and memory—can help leaders skillfully achieve their foreign policy agenda. Yet, as international relations (IR) scholarship has long recognized, foreign policy bureaucracies often push back against or outright sabotage the leaders they serve. How do leaders weigh these possibilities and decide how to incorporate the bureaucracy into their policymaking? This presentation will explore these questions using comparative case studies of Indian Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.