How a Nazi occupied India’s first chair in International Relations

In this short video extract, authors Vineet Thakur and Ladhu Ram Choudhary discuss the key arguments from their new Review of international studies article - How a Nazi occupied India’s first chair in International Relations

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052400055X

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Abstract

This article contributes to disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) by revealing a little-known history: how a Nazi diplomat, Curt Max Prüfer, occupied the first chair in IR in India. While the paper documents how Prüfer, a discredited diplomat, landed in Delhi through his connections with peripatetic Indian anti-colonial networks and spent slightly over two years as the first IR chair at Delhi University, it also makes broader claims about how we narrate disciplinary histories. Intellectual genealogies, the predominant way in which disciplinary histories are written, often miss the contingent factors that play a considerable role in the fashioning of the discipline. Contingency-filled narratives also point towards the fact that International Relations/Affairs, at least in its early period of formation, operated as a term of mythical heft – a placeholder to fit anyone with academic or practical expertise in varied fields such as international law, colonial administration, anthropology, diplomacy, history, political economy, and military strategy.
 

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