I am a University Lecturer in International Relations at the Institute for History, Leiden University.

More information about Vineet Thakur

I graduated with a doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in May 2014. After teaching briefly at Ambedkar University (India), I moved to South Africa for a postdoc at the University of Johannesburg. Two and a half memorable years later, I landed a short teaching gig at School of Oriental and African Studies London. From there it was a short hop across the pond -- and since September 2017, I have been teaching, happily, at Leiden University. My research has enabled me to accumulate brief fellowships at the University of Cambridge, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and Rhodes University.

I started out as a postcolonial IR scholar with interest in 'decolonizing' the discipline, its subject matter and its practices. Over time, I have come to reflect on the onerous burden of postcoloniality in IR and, coming from India, its caste-effacing character. History as my secondary discipline is thus a refuge -- research-wise, diplomatic biography is where I feel most at home.

Books

• V.S. Srinivasa Sastri: A Liberal Life (Routledge, 2023)

• India’s First Diplomat: V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and the Making of Liberal Internationalism (Bristol University Press 2021)

• South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations (Rowman and Littlefield 2020 – with Peter Vale; winner, Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations)

• The Imperial Discipline: Race and the Founding of International Relations (Pluto Press, 2020 – with Alexander Davis and Peter Vale)

• Postscripts on Independence: Foreign Policy Discourses in India and South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2018)

• Jan Smuts and the Indian Question (University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2017).

Publications

Activities