Disrupting the Empire and Forging IR: The Role of India’s Early Think Tanks in the Decolonisation Process, 1936–1950s

Abstract

Unlike their Western counterparts, the roles and history of non-Western think tanks have been little studied. The first Indian think tank, the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), has been mostly considered peripheral to the history of International Relations and the end of the British Empire. Yet, this organisation was neither just an addition to Dominion institutes studying international affairs, nor simply a colonial institution against which the nationalist Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) emerged. Moulded in the image of the metropole think tank, Chatham House, and its sister organisations, the IIIA was set up with the same objective of strengthening the empire through new institutional bonds and a common global outlook. Instead, it contributed to disrupting the imperial logic underlying this project through India’s internationalisation and the diverging worldview it publicised within the Commonwealth. The ICWA can be understood within this trajectory of emancipation from the global project of Empire, and within a larger struggle to define the world order. Revisiting early Indian think tanks helps us better understand the relation between IR, political power, and decolonisation, and retrieve a non-Western international engagement, one parallel but distinct from the well-known anticolonial internationalism of the interwar years.