LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Anjana Basu is the author of six novels. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman; the BBC has broadcast one of her short stories, and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. She has appeared in The Antigonish Review. The Edinburgh Review and The Salzburg Review have also featured her work. In 2003, Harper Collins India brought out her novel Curses in Ivory.  In 2004, she was awarded a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship in Scotland where she worked on her second novel, Black Tongue, published by Roli in 2007. She has worked on the dialogues for the film, The Last Lear, directed by Rituparno Ghosh.

Dai Bingguo is a Chinese politician and diplomat who became one of the highest-ranking leaders of Chinese foreign policy under the president, Hu Jintao. Currently, Dai is the Chairman of Jinan University, and honorary dean of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University. A graduate of Sichuan University, majoring in Russian language, he was instrumental in the normalisation of diplomatic relations between China and the Soviet Union. Between 1989 and 1991 Dai served as the Chinese ambassador to Hungary. He then held a succession of positions at the Department of Foreign Affairs. He has served as State Councillor, and director of the general office of the National Security Leadership Group of the central committee of the Communist Party of China.

Japish Singh Gill is currently in the final year of his under-graduate degree at Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, School of Liberal Studies, majoring in International Relations. He is a co-author, with Ryan Mitra, of “India’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: Understanding India’s Spheres of Influence,” in the Sigma Iota Rho Journal of International Relations, and the paper, “India’s Growing Maritime Opportunities in Indonesia: Room for Development in Diplomacy and Capacity Building,” in the forthcoming 2018-19 winter journal of the National Maritime Foundation. He aims to pursue a Master’s in International Affairs and Diplomacy in 2019.

Nimmi Kurian is a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and an Academic Advisor, India China Institute, The New School, New York. Her research interests include Asian borderlands, federalism and foreign policy, comparative regionalism and subregionalism, transboundary water politics, and multilevel and network governance. She is one of the authors of the India Country Report as part of the Joint Study Group on the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor constituted by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. Her recent publications include: India and China: Rethinking Borders and Security (co-author) University of Michigan Press, 2016; The India China Borderlands: Conversations Beyond the Centre, Sage, 2014; “Re-engaging the ‘International’: A Social History of the Trans-Himalayan Borderlands,” Journal of Borderlands Studies (Joensuu, Finland, 2019 forthcoming);  “Why the ‘Good’ Refugee is a Bad Idea,” Open Democracy, 1 April 2018; “How Suu Kyi can Change the Rohingya Narrative,” Diplomatist, November 2017; “Addressing the Drought of Ideas on the Brahmaputra,” China-India Brief, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, October 2017; “Doklam: The Game of Shadows,” Asia Society, New York, August 2017; and other articles.

Harish C. Mehta holds a PhD (McMaster University, Canada) in the history of American foreign relations and Southeast Asia, and the twentieth-century history of China. Author of three books on Cambodian politics and media, his articles on Vietnamese diplomacy have appeared in the American journals Diplomatic History, Peace and Change, The Historian, and History Compass, and his review articles have appeared in H-Diplo. He has taught history at McMaster, the University of Toronto, and Trent University. He has twice won the Samuel Flagg Bemis research award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and has received the Asian Print Media Write Award from the Asian Media Information and Communication Center, Singapore, and a Freedom Forum Fellowship, Washington, DC, among other awards. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Calcutta Journal of Global Affairs. Harish is a former Senior Indochina Correspondent for the Business Times of Singapore, and he was based in Singapore and Thailand for seventeen years, covering both Southeast Asia and Asean.

Julie Banerjee Mehta holds a Master’s degree and PhD in English Literature and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, and another MA from Jadavpur University, Calcutta. A specialist in world literature, cultural and diaspora studies, she currently teaches postcolonial literature at Loreto College, Calcutta, and has taught at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada. She conceptualised and taught the course, “Asian Cultures and Literatures in Canada,” endowed by the Canadian Senator and Chancellor Emerita, Vivienne Poy, and other courses on Asian Canadian Cultural History and Literature at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Studies Program and Department of English for seven years. She has published on how food and language are employed by Asian diasporic writers to signpost identity and preserve memory in their adopted homelands. Dr. Mehta is the author of Dance of Life: Mythology, History and Politics of Cambodian Culture (2001), a cultural study about how diasporic efforts by displaced Khmer people preserved Cambodian culture when it had been silenced during the genocide in the 1970s. She is also co-author of the best-selling biography of Cambodian Prime Minister Strongman, with historian Dr. Harish Mehta. Her translation of Tagore’s play Post Office was performed in Toronto by Pleiades Theatre in 2010 as part of the Indo-Canadian celebrations to mark Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th anniversary and to celebrate the Year of India in Canada. She has just completed her first novel.

Ryan Mitra is a third-year undergraduate student at the Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University, School of Liberal Studies, majoring in International Relations. His areas of interest are diplomacy, maritime relations, nuclear strategy, and Indian foreign policy. He is a co-author, with Japish S. Gill, of “India’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: Understanding India’s Spheres of Influence,” in the Sigma Iota Rho Journal of International Relations, and the paper, “India’s Growing Maritime Opportunities in Indonesia: Room for Development in Diplomacy and Capacity Building,” in the forthcoming 2018-19 winter journal of the National Maritime Foundation. Ryan aims to pursue a Master’s in International Relations/Affairs and Diplomacy in 2020.

Kamaran M. K. Mondal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Chandidas Mahavidyalaya, the University of Burdwan in West Bengal. He holds an MPhil and a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His articles have appeared in the International Studies Quarterly, Inquest: A Journal of Social Science and Humanities, and The Milli Gazette Online, and his book chapters have been published in Terrorism and Human Rights in the Globalizing World: Experience in Indian Context; Thoughts on Liberal Arts and Popular Culture; Globalisation, Environment and Sustainable Development: Indian Perspective; Development and Politics in India; and State, Nation and Multiculturalism: Problems in Perspectives

John Ranjan Mukherjee (Lt.-Gen., Retd., PVSM, AVSM, VSM) is a former General Officer Commanding Kashmir (15 Corps), and Chief of Staff, Eastern Command. He is the author of An Insider’s Experience of Insurgency in India’s North East, and The Indomitable Rhino Warriors of India’s North East: History of the Assam Regiment. He belongs to the Assam Regiment, which recruits men only from the North Eastern region of India. He has served twenty-six years in the North East, and has lived with the men of his regiment and people from the region almost all his life, and is married to a Mizo lady.

M.K. Narayanan was the National Security Advisor of India with the rank of minister of state from 2005 to 2010. During his tenure he held several rounds of talks with his Chinese counterpart, the State Councillor Dai Bingguo, to resolve differences over the Indo-China border. He served as the Governor of West Bengal from 2010 to 2014. The government of India awarded him the civilian honour of Padma Shri in 1992. Narayanan completed his graduation from Loyola College, Chennai. He headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) from 1987 to 1990, before leading the Joint Intelligence Committee for a year. He became Chief (a four-star rank, equivalent to an Army general) of the IB again in 1991, before retiring in 1992. He was then appointed Special Adviser (a non-Civil Service appointment) for Internal Security to the Prime Minister of India beginning in May 2004. He played a significant role in the negotiation of the landmark Indo-U.S. Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2008.

Toh Han Shih holds a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in physics from Oxford University. He also has a Master’s in Southeast Asian Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and has completed a part-time Master’s of Economics at Hong Kong University. Han Shih is a Singapore-born writer with twenty years of experience in business journalism. He lives in Hong Kong. In December 2016, he published the book, Is China an Empire? Previously, he worked as a journalist at the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong for nearly ten years. From 2007 to 2008, he worked at Kroll, and in the late 1990s, he was a reporter at the Business Times in Singapore.

Wang Xiaolan is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Theory, School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University, China. Xiaolan earned her Master’s degree in Western Political Thought at Anqing Normal University in Anhui, China. Her PhD research focuses on Western Political Thought, specifically on the writings of Lord Acton and theories of nationality and liberty. Xiaolan’s recent publications are: “Analysis of Lord Acton’s Government” [浅析阿克顿政府观], Journal of Honghe University, 2013; “The Dilemma and Transcendence of American Democracy” [试析美式民主的困境与超越], Journal of Jiangxi Normal University, 2014; “Analysis of Lord Acton’s Constitutional View” [浅析阿克顿宪政观念], Journal of Chifeng College, 2015, and “The Study of Lord Acton’s Christian Nationality [浅析阿克顿基督教民族主义], Journal of Jiangsu Second Normal University, 2016). Xiaolan is currently researching the subject of government management and policy implementation.

Yan Na is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Theory, School of Political Science and Public Administration, Shandong University, China. She works as an associate researcher at the Institute of Culture, Shandong Academy of Social Sciences. She recently published Study on the Integration of Shandong Tourism into "One Belt and One Road" Development Strategy (Shandong People’s Publishing House, 2017). Her research areas focus on cultural policy, tourism politics, and cultural legislation. She has published more than ten articles in this field such as “Study on the Construction and Countermeasures of Urban Cultural Image in China,” [我国城市文化形象的构建与对策研究], Dongyue Tribune, 2011, and “Study on Brand Strategy of Cultural Tourism in Shandong” [山东文化旅游品牌战略研究], Theory Journal, 2011. She is currently working on a co-authored book, Introduction to Chinese Culture.