India China : rethinking borders and security / L.H.M. Ling, Adriana Erthal Abdenur, Payal Banerjee, Nimmi Kurian, Mahendra P. Lama, and Li Bo.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-170) and index.

Foreword / Patrick Thaddeus Jackson -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: What's Not There: India-China / L.H.M. Ling -- Chapter 1. Trans-Himalayas: From the Silk Road to World War II / Adriana Erthal Abdenur -- Chapter 2. Borders as Opportunities: Changing Matrices in Northeast India and Southwest China / Mahendra P. Lama -- Chapter 3. Subregionalizing IR: Bringing the Borderlands Back In / Nimmi Kurian -- Chapter 4. Dialogue across Borders: Dam Projects in Yunnan and Sikkim / Payal Banerjee and Li Bo -- Chapter 5. Border Pathology: Ayurveda and Zhongyi as Therapeutic Strategies / L.H.M. Ling. Conclusion: What's Ahead: India-China in the World / Borderlands Studies GroupMaps -- Bibliography -- Author Biographies -- Index

Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India. Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.