Blog

This is a mild evolution/broadening of my earlier Insurgency, Civil War, and Terrorism class, now including more on interstate war, criminal violence, and election/vigilante violence. Here’s the current syllabus.

For those trying to figure out what just happened in Nepal, a few of (a great many, and more to come) excellent explainers are here:

1. Akhilesh Upadhyay in the Hindustan Times: “Nepal’s uncertain course after Gen Z’s protests”
2. Pranaya Rana in Himal (and also his Substack): “Nepal’s staggering journey from Gen Z protests to new government”
3. Mahesh Kushwaha in the Indian Express: “The many revolutions that have shaped Nepal”
4. Uzair Younus interviews Ashish Pradhan on Pakistonomy (YouTube)

I also have a piece out in Journal of Democracy seeking to identify four preliminary insights from protests leading to the collapse of governments in 2025 Nepal, 2024 Bangladesh, and 2022 Sri Lanka (acknowledging that there are also big differences across them). A preview of the takeaways is below:
1. “organizationally amorphous, decentralized movements have proven to be remarkably potent tools against political establishments that lack legitimacy and whose governing institutions and ruling political parties have been hollowed out by patronage and personalism”
2. “Elections are necessary but not sufficient to reform a political system, though there is little clarity or consensus on what is needed in addition to voting. . . it is not always obvious what form the new democratic order should take for each of these protest movements”
3. “militaries have shown that they are crucially important political players. . . once militaries become a crucial force in political life, it will be difficult to get them fully back into the barracks”
4. “all three cases show how quickly internal political changes can unsettle international politics. . .forcing major powers such as China and India — which, despite their considerable influence, are often unable to control their neighbors’ domestic politics”

ISP-Myanmar just published a very valuable report, Prospective 4th-Generation Tatmadaw: Pathways to Reform or Further Regression? It offers a useful timeline and mapping of the dramatic events of November 2023-April 2024, during which the military took serious losses and armed groups made important gains, while also showing data on the stabilization and recovery since then. I further learned a lot from their mapping of the current military elite in Myanmar – who holds what positions and ranks, their ages, and who might be the next level of commanders.

This kind of “micro-level military politics” is an enduring interest of mine (i.e. this article on Pakistan I wrote with Naseemullah and Butt) but requires enormous time and detailed contextual knowledge/date that most political scientists simply don’t have. Check out the whole report.

Srinath Raghavan is one of the great historians of contemporary India (and South Asia). His new book on Indira Gandhi is a must-read. But I also found a lot of value-added beyond the book in this great interview of him by Rohan Venkat on Rohan’s excellent India Inside Out Substack. Go forth and read the interview.

In the last blog post, I highlighted recent Pew data on Indian views of the United States and China. Today Pew continues its streak of important data about India and public opinion with views of India in a couple dozen other countries. One thing we want to be careful about is attributing too much to year-on-year shifts (surveys can be noisy, response rates can vary, etc) but it’s still interesting and worth keeping an eye on.

First, the overall favorables. I was struck by how evenly divided opinion in the US is (more below), and the lack of high favorables in Australia and South Korea compared to Japan and Indonesia. Not clear how much of this is signal versus noise, but interesting to note.

Second, change since last year (again, take with grains of salt):

Third, after going through some gender and age splits, Pew notes that there isn’t a consistent ideological cleavage in views of India:

This speaks to questions about whether India is perceived more favorably by the Republicans in the US; consistent with my poking into the question way back in 2019, there is some evidence that the American left is more pro-India on aggregate than the right. Given the heightened anti-Indian sentiment (around H1Bs, for instance) in the Trump coalition, this should be little surprise, and certainly doesn’t suggest a strong pro-India mass constituency on the right.

Donald Trump’s approach to India over tariffs will be bad for US foreign policy. New Delhi will surely figure out a way to do business with the US in the coming weeks and years, but it seems pretty obvious that it will not be able to trust the US as a reliable strategic partner (at least, I sure wouldn’t). A wildly mercurial, punitive America is not going to reach its potential as a hub in an effective series of bi- and multi-lateral relationships in Asia. India has limited options since Russia is not a full substitute and China is at the end of the day a strategic rival, so I don’t expect it to break entirely from the US or anything. But New Delhi will likely see a lower ceiling on future cooperation with the US than in a counterfactual world in which this was all handled differently. And I say this as someone who has often been more skeptical than the conventional wisdom on US-India ties, so not a booster or someone whose professional status depends on an ever-improving relationship.

The particularly perverse aspect here is that Trump’s policies come at a time when the Indian public is (was?) notably pro-US compared to many other middle-income states. Pew just had a fascinating piece on views of the US and China in several such countries, and as of spring 2025, India was much less concerned about the US than its contemporaries:

This is consistent with decades of survey work on Indian attitudes – often skeptical of particular US foreign policies, but quite positive at a broad level about the United States. It’s possible that this will continue, but the nature of Trump’s highly public, unambiguous denunciations of India – alongside his renewed ties with Pakistan – may trigger a serious drop in this sentiment. And all for no clear reason: it’s a gratuitously insulting, counterproductive way to run a country’s foreign policy, especially toward states like India that are not locked into being US protectorates like Europe or parts of NE Asia, and that have at least some room to maneuver in response.

My Carnegie Endowment colleague Ashley Tellis wrote a critical piece on “India’s Great Power Delusions” back in June in Foreign Affairs. Today, we see responses from Nirupama Rao, Dhruva Jaishankar, and Lisa Curtis, plus a reaction by Tellis. Go forth and read the exchange for both defenses and critiques of India’s current foreign policy.

Japan Camera Hunter is a well-known expert/seller of high-quality Japanese (and some German) camera gear, mostly vintage but some modern. Below is a nice video he made on the Canon rangefinder series of the 1950s/1960s – they used the Leica thread mount (what Leica used before introducing the M mount). I have a Canon Serenar 50/1.8 from the early 1950s in LTM and it is a shockingly good lens for the age. Canon transitioned to its FL/FD mount in the early 1970s, which is when it really began to take off as a top-tier camera maker (the electronic/autofocus EF mount came in the late 1980s and marked another step forward). As boring as I used to find Canon back in the day (I started with Olympus and then Fuji), all of my stuff now is Canon – an A-1 (from my grandfather-in-law) with a couple FD lenses and Canonet QL17 G-III (starting to break down so need repaired but worked great for me for a decade despite being from the 1970s) for film, an R8 and a number of RF lenses, plus the Serenar and an EF lens that I adapt to the R8. They just work, and the ergonomics are lovely and functional, even if the modern cameras have all the design flashiness and vintage flair of a 2017 Honda Accord.

JCH on Canon’s rangefinder series: