The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains

This book makes a paradigm-shifting contribution to the geopolitical study of the region by including the Himalaya itself—its geology, ecologies and peoples—in its analysis. Given that these mountains provide water to half of humanity, the book is a much-needed, internationally important intervention.” – Dr Ruth Gamble (La Trobe University)

“An essential and timely intervention in South Asian IR and geopolitics, a field currently dominated by statist analysis, often to the exclusion of urgent concerns of the increasingly fragile Himalayan ecology. The book initiates much needed conversations in IR, South Asian Studies and Himalayan Studies.” – Dr Sonika Gupta (IIT Madras)

The book addresses the urgent need for rethinking the geopolitics and ecology in the Himalaya, by emphasising the entanglements between these two factors. Most international relations analyses of the Himalaya emphasize the central role of the region’s states and their great power struggles. By reducing the region to its state actors, however, we miss the intense more-than-human diversity of the region, and the crucial role that the mountains play in the global environment. 

In doing so, the book makes a major contribution to international relations theory by drawing on insights from international political ecology. It first theorises international political ecology and examines the Himalaya as a global region, before moving looking at the international aspects of political ecology in the Himalaya through key areas of the mountains where international politics and ecology are deeply, inextricably linked. It presents three detailed case studies of different environmental and political issues in the Himalaya: icecaps (the India-China-Pakistan boundary dispute in the western Himalaya), foothills and forests (the Nepal-Bhutan-Sikkim borderlands), and rivers (the India-China Bangladesh dispute over the Brahmaputra Riverbasin). Each case study draws on a mix of source materials including fieldwork, government sources, foreign policy discourse, Himalayan ethnographies, and environmental and ecological sciences scholarship.
Alexander E. Davis is a lecturer in International Relations at The University of Western Australia. His research focuses on South Asia’s foreign relations, from historical, postcolonial and environmental perspectives.