Scars of the empire

Manjari Chatterjee Miller

This dissertation argues that states that have undergone a transformative historical event should be treated as a separate category of actors with unique patterns of behavior--patterns determined not by the classic realist goals of maximizing security and material capability, but by the historically-influenced phenomenon of strategic ideology. As a primary case study it shows that states such as China and India that have undergone the transformative historical event of extractive colonialism, have developed a particular type of strategic ideology that can be called "post-imperial ideology" (PII) and that is driven by three national goals, the most prominent of which is the desire to be acknowledged and empathized with, in the international system, as a victim. It suggests that PII accounts for important foreign policy decisions taken by China and India that do not conform to...