Dhruva Jaishankar is Executive Director of Observer Research Foundation (ORF) America, which he helped establish in 2020. From 2016 to 2019, Jaishankar was a Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings India in New Delhi and the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. From 2012 to 2016, he was a Transatlantic Fellow with the German Marshall Fund (GMF) in Washington DC, where he managed the India Trilateral Forum, a regular policy dialogue involving participants from India, Europe, and the United States. From 2009 to 2012, he was program officer with the Asia Program at GMF. Before that, he worked as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington and as a news writer and reporter for CNN-IBN television in New Delhi. 

In 2015-2016, Jaishankar was a Visiting Fellow with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research — on India’s relations with the United States, Japan, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Europe; defence and security policy; and globalization, democracy, and technology — has been published in several books, policy reports, and publications including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Survival. He holds a B.A. in History and Classics from Macalester College, and an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University. His book, Vishwa Shastra: India and the World was published by Penguin Random House India in December 2024. 

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

I study the international relations of India and its place in world affairs, which is the subject of my forthcoming book, Vishwa Shastra: India and the World. There is a fair amount of interesting extant literature on the subject but still vast gaps that need to be filled. I find historical works to be most useful, but, amazingly, some important subjects such as India-Russia relations, the 1965 India-Pakistan war or India’s foreign policy of the 1990s have not received sufficient treatment: that is, a PhD dissertation or good book-length study based on primary source material. 

The politics of India’s international economy and trade and its recent relations with Southeast Asia are also still underserved. In addition, a range of potentially fascinating topics, including migration and technology, exist. At the same time, many other areas, including the Cold War and India’s nuclear program, have been studied and documented quite extensively, so I am sceptical of new undertakings in these areas. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking? 

I have seen a swing in trends in contemporary international relations even over the past 20 years that I have been around professionally. The early 2000s saw the ascendance of U.S.-led IR liberalism (such as the work of John Ikenberry and Francis Fukuyama) and a greater emphasis on regional studies, particularly of the Middle East and the Islamic world after the 9/11 attacks. Academically, the trends have shifted over time to quantitative methods and constructivist theories, to the point that these dominate political science departments at major universities. But I........

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