Professor Nivi Manchanda, BA (SOAS), MPhil (Cambridge), PhD (Cambridge)

Profile

 

Teaching

POL251

PO377

POL390

Research

Research Interests:

I am especially interested in the ways in which knowledge is produced and the raced, classed and gendered nature of both ‘expertise’ and ‘common-sense’.

Although I don’t have regional focus per se, I am interested in the histories of colonial intervention in South Asia and the Middle East. I am also increasingly interested in role of capitalism in perpetuating racial hierarchies globally as well as resistance to racial capitalism in both the West and the Global South.

 

Examples of research funding:

I received funding for my PhD from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trusts. I have also been the recipient of numerous other grants including Santander Research Grants and the Cambridge Political Economy Trust. Between February and May of 2022, I was the recipient of a Katekisama Fellowship based at the University of Basel. I received an AHRC Research Fellowship (£250,000) for my project on borders between 2022 and 2024. I am currently a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellow which comes with £100,000 of research funding.

Publications

Monograph

Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge Cambridge University Press, 2020

• Prizes
  • LHM Ling First Outstanding Book Award in any area of International Relations by the British International Studies Association
  • Honourable Mention (second prize) for Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations awarded by the International Studies Association
  • Honourable Mention for the Global Development Studies Book Prize awarded by the International Studies Association
  • Runner up for the International Political Sociology Book Prize awarded by the International Studies Association

• Forums
  • Environment and Planning D: Society and Space: https://www.societyandspace.org/book-review-forums/imagining-afghanistan-by-nivi-manchanda
  • Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/841346/pdf
  • Cambridge Review of International Affairs: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09557571.2022.2059634

• Reviews
  • American Historical Review: https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/127/4/1973/6998260
  • Critical Asian Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14672715.2021.1878675
  • E-IR: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/12/23/review-imagining-afghanistan-the-history-and-politics-of-imperial-knowledge/Interventions:
  • Interventions: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369801X.2021.1885465
  • Pacific Affairs: https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/paaf/paaf/2021/00000094/00000003/art00026
  • Journal of Development Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00220388.2022.2051834
  • India Quarterly: A journal of International Affairs: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09749284211068509

• Podcasts and Interviews: Jadaliyya, New Books Network, Transatlantic Puzzle

 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

‘Democracy, Diversity and Disavowal: Tracing colonial lineages in India’s long wars’ [with Rhys Machold], Review of International Studies,  2025: firstview: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525100910

‘The Moving Spirit of Settler Colonialism: Temsula Ao, Counter-Sovereignty, and the Politics of Intervention in the Borderlands of India.’ International Studies Quarterly 68(2) 1-13 2024

‘From frontier-making to world-making: The enduring power of frontiers in South Asia’ [with Oliver Turner] Political Geography 113 (2) 103-133 2024

‘Business, power, and private regulatory governance: Shaping subjectivities and limiting possibilities in the gold supply chain’ [with Michael Bloomfied] Regulation & Governance, 18(1), 81-98, 2024

‘The Janus-faced nature of militarization’ Critical Military Studies 10.2 137-145, 2023

‘Between mobile corridors and immobilizing borders: race, fixity and friction in Palestine/Israel’. [with Sharri Plonski] International Affairs, 98(1), 183-207. 2022

‘The banalization of race in international security studies: From absolution to abolition’ Security Dialogue, 52(1_suppl), 49-59, 2022

‘Resisting racial militarism: War, policing and the Black Panther Party [with Chris Rossdale] Security Dialogue 52 (6) 473-492, 2021

‘The Graveyard of Empires: Haunting, Amnesia and Afghanistan’s Construction as a Burial Site’ Middle East Critique 68 (3) 307-320, 2020

‘Empires H(a)unting Grounds: Theorising Violence and resistance in Egypt and Afghanistan’ [with Sara Salem] Current Sociology 241-261, 2020

‘The Imperial Sociology of the “Tribe” in Afghanistan, Millennium, 46(1) 165-189 2018

‘Rendering Afghanistan Legible: Practices of (dis)order and the ‘state of Afghanistan’ Politics vol. 37 (4) 386-401, 2017

‘Queering the Pashtun: Afghan Sexuality in the Homonationalist Imaginary’, Third World Quarterly, 36(1) pp130-14, 2015

 

Edited Volumes

Book co-editor, Thinking World Politics Otherwise, Oxford University Press (with Laura Shepherd, Stefanie Fischel and Cai Wilkinson) forthcoming, January 2025

Editor, Special Issue, ‘Critical Encounters: Militarism, Race, and Postcolonial Studies’ forthcoming in Security Dialogue (with Katharine Millar and Chris Rossdale)

Book co-editor, Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, Routledge Interventions Series (with Alex Anievas and Robbie Shilliam), 2014.

Editor, Special Issue, ‘Confronting the Global Colour Line: Space, Race and Imperial Hierarchy’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs (with Alex Anievas), Vol. 26, no. 1, 2013.

 

Book Chapters

‘Borders and Queer Theory’ in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Race and Racism edited by Gargi Bhattacharya. (forthcoming 2025)

‘Huey Newton and the Theory of Intercommunalism’ in Disembodied Territories edited by Sara Salem and Menna Agha with Columbia University Press (forthcoming 2025)

‘The Durand Line’ in The Oxford Handbook of South Asian Borders, edited by Raja Mohan and Jasnea Sarna, Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2025)

‘Race and Racism’ in the Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations, Oxford University Press edited by Eddy Keene, Maja Spanu and Christian Reuss-Smit, Oxford University Press 2023

‘Racial Capitalism and American Foreign Policy Under Trump’ in The Liberal Order Strikes Back? Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the Future of International Politics edited by Robert L. Jervis, Diane N. Labrosse, Stacie Goddard, and Joshua Rovner, Columbia University Press 2023

‘The Imperial Sociology of the ‘Tribe’ Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, edited by Robbie Shilliam and Olivia Rutazibwa, London: Routledge, 2018

‘Security and Postcolonialism’ Security Studies: An Introduction edited by Paul Williams and Matt McDonalds, London: Routledge, 2023 [contribution to 3^rd and 4^th editions]

‘Gender, Nation and Nationalism’ (with Leah de Haan) in Race, Gender and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives edited by Randolph Persaud and Alina Sajed, London: Routledge, 2018

 

Works in Progress

Thinking the Border Otherwise: Global Solidarity against Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism monograph under contract with Stanford University Press, provisionally forthcoming in fall/winter 2026

‘Bobbies Beyond Borders: Race and British Policing [with Paul Higate] under review in International Political Sociology

 

Forums, Reviews, and other select publications

‘Racism’ in The Elgar Encyclopedia of International Relations edited by Beate Jahn and Sebastian Schindler, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2025

‘Nomads, Borders, and Racial Capitalism’ in a collective forum entitled “Nomads’ Land: Exploring the Social and Political Life of the Nomad Category”, International Political Sociology, 18(4): 2024

‘Anglotopia and the limits of the white imaginary’ in a forum on Duncan Bell’s Dreamworlds of Race edited by Lucian Ashworth International Politics Review, pp1-4, 2023

‘Intercommunalism as Abolition: Huey Newton and the Politics of Borders’ Disembodied Territories https://disembodiedterritories.com/Nivi-Manchanda

‘Lifting the Veil on Racial Capitalism: American Democracy Before and After Trump’ H-Diplo International Security Studies Forum https://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/ps2021-46

Borders, Corridors, and Racial Capitalism Antipode Online [with Sharri Plonski]

‘The lure of racist democracy.’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 1-6., 2021

‘Whither Race in Planetary Governance?: A response to Stephen Gill’ Global Affairs Manchanda, N. (2019).Global Affairs, 5(2), 145-148, 2019

Book review: "The earth, the city and the hidden narrative of race." African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 11(3), 2018 pp. 318–319

'Made in the Royal Navy and Sold to the State' (with Paul Higate) Forces Watch Report entitled ‘Belonging and self-fulfilment: An analysis of contemporary British military recruitment marketing’ (February, 2019)

‘The right to maim: the interstitial existence between biopolitics and necropolitics’, (Symposium on Jasbir Puar’s The right to Maim) The Disorder of Things, December 3, 2018: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2018/12/03/the-right-to-maim-the-interstitial-existence- between-biopolitics-and-necropolitics/

‘Colour, gender, religion: there’s more than political correctness to the new British Army recruitment campaign’ (with Paul Higate), The Conversation January 17, 2018

‘An African American Social Science: International Relations’, (book review of Bob Vitalis’ White World Order, Black Politics) The Disorder of Things June 8, 2016 available at: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2016/06/08/an-african-american-social-science- international-relations/

Supervision

Currently co-supervising: Akram Salhab, Zak Tobias, Vanshika Bhatt and Magdalena Fackler.

I’d be keen to supervise students working on anti-racism, queer/trans theories of gender, Marxist approaches to the state and borders, and histories and presents of (settler) colonialism.

Public Engagement

I have written for the Conversation, Open Democracy, and appeared on news outlets including the BBC (world service, History Hour) and CNN.

I have also advised NGOs, museums, and theatre companies. I am currently working on an FCDO funded project on political resistance in borderlands.