Speaker Date: April 18, 2025

GREAT DECISIONS TOPIC: Fluid Geopolitics of South Asia: Challenges and Opportunities 

India is at a volatile crossroads in South Asia.

In summer 2024, India lost one of its close allies as student uprising deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Towards the end of 2024, China announced to build new dams on rivers originating from Tibet, threating India’s efforts to build similar dams downstream. Such tensions are not new in international relations, India’s reaction to China’s growing financial and infrastructural influence in South Asia has been closely observed.

Drawing from scholarship on Indo-China relations and personal experience of growing up in a frontier area, my talk will discuss India’s challenges and opportunities to becomes a regional and global leader.

Video Presentation

Parag Jyoti Saikia

Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

BIOGRAPHY

Parag Jyoti Saikia is studying the construction of a hydropower dam in India to understand how infrastructures in-the-making shape everyday life, the environment, and geopolitics.

He is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). His research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council and UNC’s Graduate School.

He is a public-engaged scholar who has also been awarded to Public Scholar’s Training Fellowship from SAPIENS magazine. For nearly a decade, he has been associated with grassroots organizations working on dams, rivers, and the environment, and been writing about these issues both in English and Assamese, his mother tongue. His writings have appeared on The Conversation, SAPIENS, South Asia blog of London School of Economics, The Wire, and Asia Times.