COSAS member, Associate Professor of Political Science, and faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations (CIR) Paul Staniland released his latest publication last week entitled The Politics of Opposition in South Asia. Staniland co-edited the piece with Milan Vaishnav from the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. 

The piece covers the South Asian region as a whole and attempts to fill a gap in the literature of opposition politics. “There has been no shortage of scholarship on South Asia’s democratic backsliding, exploring topics such as declining representative institutions, civil-military relations, and the suppression of individual freedoms. However, what is missing in many of these accounts is a clear understanding of the state of opposition politics. For obvious reasons, most accounts of backsliding focus on the strategies and tactics of regimes, often treating the opposition as a passive actor. Yet, unpacking the nature of the opposition—and the dramatic variation in its forms—not only helps explain regime dynamics, but it also informs the possibilities of democratic renewal as well as the further consolidation of autocratic dynamics and the prospects for violence. The ten essays in this series on the politics of opposition in South Asia cover a range of countries—Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—as well as a diversity of themes, from digital repression to violent militancy and citizen mobilization. An introductory article reflects on the series, as well as other examples from the region, to identify a set of themes that sharpen the understanding of opposition dynamics in contemporary South Asia.”

More information can be found here and the PDF version of the piece is available here. 

Congratulations to Dr. Staniland on this fantastic achievement.