Meta Narratives and Subaltern Voices: Role of the Ford Foundation in South Asia.

This paper analyses the Ford Foundation’s knowledge-building enterprise in International Relations in the South Asian context. It examines the Ford’s contribution towards building institutional infrastructures-physical as well as intellectual-in the region and its role in promoting original thinking in IR from the South Asians point of view. We argue that the Ford has significantly promoted regional networks among scholars and think tanks and created regional research institutions such as Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS) and South Asian Centre for Policy Studies (SACEPS). In the realm of ideas, however, it has remained mired in the prevailing and dominant modes of thinking, yielding little spaces for the subaltern voices, which fundamentally question the ‘given’ parameters of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]