The Critical Caste International Studies (CCIS) Network brings together scholars and practitioners to examine the relationship between caste and international studies. Inspired by Prof. Gajendran Ayyadurai’s call to develop a new interdisciplinary field of critical caste studies, the CCIS Network is an effort to foreground the caste-inflected nature of discourse and practice in international relations and diplomatic studies. In so doing, this CCIS network joins similar interdisciplinary efforts, such as the Caste as Practice Research Network, the Bahujan Scholars Network, the Confronting Caste collective, and Action to Improve Representation.
The need for an International Relations and Diplomatic Studies-focused network arises from a peculiarly provincial nature of this discipline (broadly conceived) where ‘caste’ is definitionally relegated to being a matter of ‘domestic’ politics. Notably, with the Indian diaspora spread in 203 countries, caste is now a global institution. Moreover, when the knowledge producers and practitioners of IR in/about South Asia remain largely Savarna, caste is strongly present in its avowed absence. Even at a more conceptual level, caste provides both a logic of pecking orders and a justificatory vocabulary of hierarchy in international relations and diplomacy, which are preoccupied with status, power, prestige, and stigma as definitive of the international order.
We welcome colleagues interested in critically interrogating caste in international relations and diplomacy to join us in collectively examining its many manifestations.