In Brief: Dr Manali Kumar, our new Editor-in-Chief

In Brief: Dr Manali Kumar, our new Editor-in-Chief

5 April 2021

After an enormously successful first year in operation, 9DL is delighted to announce that Dr Manali Kumar is taking over as our new Editor-in-Chief. In his new role as Commissioning Editor, John Pollock recently sat down with Dr Kumar to discuss a range of topics including her current research, events in India and what we can expect under her leadership.

JP: You are currently an international postdoctoral fellow at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. I wonder if you could share your journey to this point and speak to what you are currently working on.

MK: It has been a journey of coincidences and a lot of luck. I grew up in New Delhi and developed an interest in social work and development fairly early on (having done a fair bit of volunteering in high school). Following an internship with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in New Delhi, I became interested in looking at the international dimensions of human security. So I did my bachelors in International Affairs and Philosophy at George Washington University, with a focus on development studies and interned at several international NGOs. Perhaps what made the biggest impression was seeing how development priorities were decided in swanky offices in Washington DC, often by individuals with little on-the-ground-knowledge, where the primary emphasis was on meeting ‘donor requirements’.

I pursued my Masters at King’s College London, which offered a very different perspective on international relations. The Washington view places America at the centre of the world. At King’s, the perspectives were more critical and postcolonial. Taking courses with Daanish Mustafa and Viviene Jabri led me to become interested in exploring the intersection of power, values, and identity.

These experiences eventually led me to pursue a PhD at the National University of Singapore (NUS). My doctoral research focused on how prudence can help inform a prescriptive theory of decision-making under uncertainty. At the same time, I got involved with the Making Identity Count Project, an international project led by Bentley Allan and Srdjan Vucetic to develop a constructivist-interpretivist dataset of national identities of ten major powers since 1950. My postdoctoral research in Switzerland builds on that work. At the moment, I am constructing a dataset of India’s national interests to investigate how India’s self-conceptions of its identities and interests have changed after becoming a rising power.

JP: Your research is fascinating, I wonder what drew you to this area?

Between my Masters and the PhD, I spent a few years working in New Delhi, including an exciting foresight and scenario-building project for the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation. What was unexpected during my interactions with DRDO staff was their insistence that India was going to be a superpower by 2030 or 2050. I remember during one of our project presentations, we laid out the various challenges India was going to face in the coming decades — demographic bulge, resource scarcity, and strategic threats, and how all of these were susceptible to climate change. However, among our clients, there was a stunning unwillingness to take seriously the gravity of these challenges — especially developmental needs — that India must confront if it really wants to become a superpower.

This experience led me to become interested in how Indians see themselves and India’s place in the world. At NUS, I was able to start exploring this interest by joining the Making Identity Count Project, which I mentioned earlier. The dataset on India, which I am now extending to 2020, is nearly complete and provides unique insights into India’s self-conceptions. I am also adapting the methodology to develop a similar dataset of India’s national interests since 1980 to get a better sense of its international goals.

JP: What do you think most people do not quite get about contemporary India?

MK: I think one major misunderstanding about India relates to this idea that it is a ‘liberal democracy’. Of course, India has been an electoral democracy since its independence, however, it does not have strong ‘liberal’ fundamentals. The ‘liberal’ part was an important aspiration. India’s founding elite championed liberal values and wrote them into the country’s constitution. However, this discourse was restricted largely to a narrow elite and the hope was that these values would trickle down into society. Unfortunately, that liberal vision of India has not quite materialised because these values did not become widespread among the country's masses.

The founding of India involved an ideological battle between majoritarian nationalists and secular liberals. And as the phenomenal rise of the BJP since 2014 and the widespread popularity of Narendra Modi indicate, despite major policy missteps from demonetisation in 2016 to the callous mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis in the early stages of 2020, the Hindu nationalists seem to be winning the long battle. As an Indian citizen, this is deeply disheartening; increasingly, I do not identify with the values that contemporary India seems to stand for. To take a recent example, the Indian government’s engagement with Myanmar in recent weeks has been disappointing, to put it mildly.

As a scholar, however, I find these shifts rather intriguing. From a policy perspective, I think it is important to understand these changes in how India sees itself, what values and principles it stands for, and the goals its leadership is trying to pursue. And perhaps there is a need for a reassessment in other countries — among partners and adversaries — on how to engage this new India.

JP: In addition to hosting many well-known voices, 9DL is keen to use its platform to showcase the next generation of leading thinkers. What do you think makes it difficult for talented voices to cut through? As our new Editor-in-Chief and based on your experience what advice can you share?

MK: Despite all the recent talk of diversity, academia remains a very unequal space. The vast majority of scholarship and opinions in public discourse remain concentrated in the Global North. There have been improvements in providing more training to early career scholars to help them make their work more accessible to policymakers and the general public. However, these efforts mostly target scholars based in universities in the industrialised world. Scholars and analysts from the Global South have fewer opportunities to share their perspectives, which is very disappointing and perpetuates intellectual hegemony.

Providing a platform to voices from the Indo-Pacific has been an important goal of 9DASHLINE since its founding, and I am looking forward to promoting this objective as Editor-in-Chief. I think the most important piece of advice I can share is for early career scholars and junior analysts to be more confident in their capabilities and to persevere. We get a lot of promising submissions from first-time writers who often struggle to articulate their ideas clearly. Our editorial team is committed to working with emerging commentators to present their ideas in sharp, well-written prose. However, writing is a skill. It takes practice. So it is important to be open to feedback and stick with the process of making revisions.

JP: You joined soon after launch and it has been a very busy first year. How would you describe your first 12 months and what do people perhaps not realise about 9DL?

MK: Yes, I joined 9DL as a contributor when it launched in March 2020, and came on board as the Associate Editor later that summer. Learning more about our editorial process and building connections with contributors from across the world has been incredibly rewarding. I have also been pleasantly surprised at just how quickly we have grown, particularly given the platform itself is managed by such a small and tight-knit team.

I think one very important aspect of 9DL is that we are not funded by anyone. We are simply a group of experienced professionals who are interested in how the politics of the Indo-Pacific are taking shape. As a distributed network we do not operate from a single office space; we are driven by a passion for the issues and lots of coffee! So apart from our hard work, an important factor underlying the platform’s success is the phenomenal support we are receiving from our community of contributors and our readers. This makes our efforts all the more rewarding.

JP: Looking ahead, what should people expect from 9DL under your leadership, and can you say a little about what is coming down the track?

MK: We have got a lot of exciting plans for the coming year. At the moment, we are growing in three key areas: content, partnerships, and our team. During our first year, we announced partnerships with South Asian Voices and Taiwan NextGen Foundation. We are currently in talks with a few other institutions around developing similar partnerships. And we are putting together a program of webinars with our partners, which we will announce soon — so definitely keep an eye out for that. We’re also developing a podcast that will be led by Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, the Head of our Associates Network. To manage these new ventures, we are also growing our team. It has been great to welcome Hunter Marston as 9DL’s Associate in Australia and we are also actively recruiting for Associate Editors. So, lot’s of energy and new stuff in store this year.

JP: Finally, people regularly reach out to us about all sorts of things. For anyone looking to support 9DL, how can they best do that?

MK: As we expand and offer new services, our operational costs are also increasing, so we will launch a Patreon page in the coming days to help us meet these overheads. 9DL is an independent platform and committed to remaining free of paywalls and advertising. I hope that our readers will consider supporting our journey by becoming one of our regular patrons or simply making a one-time donation of any amount. But most importantly — please continue engaging with 9DL by reading and sharing our content. Our success is entirely community-driven, and I hope our readers will actively participate in our webinars beginning this summer.

Biography

Dr Manali Kumar is Editor-in-Chief at 9DASHLINE and tweets at @ManaliKumar.