Browsing by Subject "India"

Far and wide, multilateral cooperation is championed as a principal response to a volatile global landscape characterized by transnational challenges, complexity, and turbulent great power relations. At the same time, many lament multilateralism to be amidst a paramount crisis of identity. New actors and powers are keen and increasingly capable of challenging the norms underpinning the traditionally Western-led, liberal international order and multilateralism adhering to it. Some argue that an era of unipolarity, and thus U.S. hegemony, is drawing to a close. China has come to depict itself as a fundamentally multilateral actor and is actively envisioning the design of multilateralism from its own normative stances. Rising powers, such as India, are increasingly eager to convey their views on how cooperation ought to be compiled and whom it should benefit. This thesis analyses the strategic narratives on multilateralism and the international order as put forth by China’s and India’s foreign policy statements. Three research questions were posed to direct and frame the analysis: How are the concepts of international order and multilateral cooperation described in foreign policy statements delivered by China and India? What kind of values or norms emerge as salient for China’s and India’s strategic narratives on multilateralism and the international order? How are these values and norms connected to China’s and India’s historical narratives of themselves on the international arena? Strategic narratives (Miskimmon et. al, 2013) provide a lens through which to examine how political actors construct shared meanings of the past, present, and future of international politics, in order to sculpt the behaviour of domestic and international actors. Examining the research questions via the lens of strategic narratives enables scrutiny into the themes of intentionality, communication as persuasive power, and the role strategically reconstructed concepts can exert on reality. In the case of China, three strategic narratives were identified: 1) a narrative of China’s origin story, depicted as a basis for both its future glory and its benevolence as a partner 2) a vision of “true” multilateralism, compiled of the three pillars of the existence of distinct civilizations, hegemony as antithetical to multilateralism, and sovereignty as a key value in multilateralism 3) a narrative of China being “ahead of times” and “on the right side of history”. In the case of India, three strategic narratives were identified, as well: 1) the narrative of insiders and outsiders, entailing an interplay of domestic and foreign policy 2) a vision of “temporal balance”, depicted as unique and inherent to the Indian civilization 3) a vision of the desirability of the diffusion of power, viewed to lead to justice and greater democracy in international relations. While the analysis primarily illuminates upon the strategic narratives on multilateralism and the international order as posed by China’s and India’s foreign policy, the results of this thesis also expand into future research themes such as emerging conceptualizations of democracy on the level of international relations, the persuasive power of fuzzy concepts, as well as the manner in which concepts may travel and assume novel, localized versions.

India is a fast growing economy with a high rate of gross domestic product that has improved the local spending power and has turned the country into a potential player in the global economy. In terms of wood products, India has been a net importer and currently is one the largest consumers of hardwood sawnwood in the world. The demand for sawnwood is rapidly growing in India and due to this situation, the country is a potential destination for Finnish and foreign exporters able to reach this market. The research attempted to increase the understanding of the importance of the demand for sawnwood in India. Thus, the purposes of this study are to: 1) provide a general description about the market environment of sawnwood in India and its situation at global level; 2) model and estimate potential factors impacting the demand level for Indian imports of sawnwood; 3) draw general conclusions about key opportunities and challenges for Finnish and major foreign exporters of sawnwood in the Indian market. Despite there is valuable information published about India’s wood market, empirical research on the Indian sawnwood market is scarce and unreliable. Hence, based on descriptive and explanatory methods, this study gathered secondary data from official and international sources for background and statistical information. The purpose was to analyze the sawnwood market through empirical modelling. Thus, econometric time-series modeling, for the period of 1992-2013, was used to explain the demand for imports of sawnwood in the Indian market by testing the conventional demand model, for income and price variables, and ad hoc models, for several explanatory variables. In addition, Engle and Granger, MacKinnon and Johansen methods were used to test cointegration among variables. The results suggest that the demand for imports of sawnwood is positively related to consumer income and negatively to prices. In addition, it depends on other factors such as population density, unemployment and economic openness. However, based on the elasticity estimates, the Indian sawnwood demand seems to be income and price elastic. The knowledge obtained in this study provides a valuable tool for foreign wood-based industries searching for market prospects to export their products as well as for public authorities involved in formulating forest and economic policies. However, further modelling is left for future research in this area.

This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements. The final word, however, is the one of the spectator. The 'new' must come from within the culture. The Indian modernity must be imaginable and distinctively Indian. The social imagination is not a 'Wild West' where new ideas enter the void and start living a life of their own. The way the young women in Dehra Dun interpreted family dramas and romantic movies highlights the importance of family and continuity in kinship arrangements. The institution of arranged marriage has changed its appearance and gained new alternative modes such as love cum arranged marriage. It nevertheless remains arranged by the parents. In my thesis I have offered a social description of a cultural reality in which movies act as a built-in part. Movies do not work as a distinct realm, but instead intertwine with the social realities of people as a part of a continuum. The social imagination is rooted in the everyday realities of people, as are the movies, in an ontological and categorical sense. According to my research, the links between imagination and social life were not so much what Arjun Appadurai would call global and deterritorialised, but instead local and conventional.

In this study the religious representations in the Facebook following of India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, are explored and analysed. The study is a theoretically informed netnographic study and its background is in the previous studies of charisma and the concept of natural religion or natural cognitions related to religion. On the essentialist–social constructionism scale the study situates itself in the essentialist end, treating the research material as an expression of the reality behind it, not just as socially constructed. As far as is known, this study is the first study using online material to analyse religious representations in the following of a secular leader figure. The research material, or data, for this study comes from Narendra Modi’s official Facebook fan page http://www.facebook.com/narendramodi.official and the comments on it. A total of of 6,617 comments were manually collected from the fan page on four separate dates: 6 November 2012, 20 November 2012, 20 July 2014 and 6 August 2014. After the collection of the comments, a software tool in python language was written to index the comments. The nature of social media, and the Internet in general, makes it mandatory to treat the research material as a mere snapshot of Modi’s rapidly changing Facebook fan page and not as a continuously existing mass of data. The different years for the material gathering represent two different political and social positions of Modi. In 2012 he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and a popular Prime Minister candidate. In 2014 his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the general election, which consequently made Modi the Prime Minister of India. The analysis of the comments and the religious representations in them thus also includes a comparative aspect, taking note of his changed social position. The analysis of the research material shows that while some of the commenters are passionate haters of Modi, the majority of his Facebook followers are big supporters of him and are charismatically oriented in their following. On his fan page, Modi is treated as a god, as a messenger of god and compared to religious figures such as Buddha and Swami Vivekananda. A savior belief in Modi is also strongly present in the comments. Some comments also show deep emotional commitment to Modi. As a new finding the study also shows that online charismatic following includes belief in reaching the leader personally through the comments despite there being hundreds of thousands of messages: some of the comments contain very personal requests and messages to Modi. As a conclusion, this study clearly supports earlier findings on charismatically oriented following drawing from natural cognitions related to religion, and shows that even in the following of a non-religious leader religious representations are clearly present. The study also reveals that social media provides a fruitful platform for the study of non-reflective beliefs. The main references for this study are: Kimmo Ketola’s The Founder of the Hare Krishnas as Seen by Devotees. A Cognitive Study of Religious Charisma (2008), Ann Ruth Willner’s The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (1984), Justin Barrett’s Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds (2011), Lee A. Kirkpatrick’s Attachment, evolution and the psychology of religion (2005), Kingshuk Nag’s The NaMo story: A Political Life (2014), Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2011) and Robert V. Kozinets’s Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online (2010).

There exists an extensive body of research on homosexuality, yet only a few studies address local meanings of homosexuality and still fewer attempt to understand the processes that construct these meanings and the values and beliefs of the people that share these meanings. Such studies would be particularly relevant in India as a developing and highly pluralistic country where the legal status of homosexuality has been in a state of flux. The unique history and religious diversity in India have shaped the way in which different communities come to understand homosexuality. Influences of both colonization and tradition are salient and constantly interacting, yet in many ways conflicting with each other. To explore these influences and intersections in relation to conceptions of homosexuality, the social representation theory was used as a methodological framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Bangalore with six families from the urban middle class representing the major religions of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. Out of these six families, two families from each of the three religions participated. For each family, one member belonged to the youngest generation (18+ years of age), one to the middle generation and one to the grandparents’ generation. As Bangalore is the second fastest growing metropolis in India, it provided a good background to explore potential influences of modernisation. The inter-generational and inter-religious approach helped to provide insights on how these categories, in addition to their national identity as Indians, entwine and frame these participants’ representations of homosexuality. Across religions and generations, three representations of homosexuality were identified: nature, nurture and culture. In the first, homosexuality was categorized in terms of what is ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, in the second in terms of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ and in the third, in terms of ‘deviant’ and ‘non-deviant’. Despite these convergent primary categorizations, participants’ ages, religions and gendered perceptions of what constitutes homosexuality intersected in diverse yet specific and patterned ways. My analysis sheds light on the functions served by these representations, local practices and customs, as well as social change in India with respect to meanings, understandings and practices of homosexuality.

This research examines the constructions of different identities and narrations of volunteering as they intersect with a culture of travel. The focus will be on how gender relates to the interpretations of experiences of volunteering and travelling in India from the viewpoint of Western women. It has been argued that travel is a genderized and gendering activity, yet gender considerations are largely unaccounted in the field of tourism research. Due to the rapid diversification and increase in travel, there have been numerous calls for studies examining the intersections of gender and travel, as well as travel and volunteering. This qualitative research addresses the shortage by exploring women's accounts of volunteering and travelling in India within the context of wider travel discussions. A gender-aware travel and voluntourism research forms the theoretical base for the thematic content analysis, which applies narrative constructionist approach. The data consists of semi-structured and conversational interviews with 7 women between the ages 20-32, and they were conducted in Finland and in India between December 2007 and January 2011. As the research explored some of the identity scenarios these women faced on their travels in India, the findings indicate that travelling and volunteering provide possible identity positions which can at times be quite empowering, but which also can entail challenges and multiplicity of conflicting identities. These ambivalent narrative positions and roles rely to some extent on the traveler discourse, which does not offer much in terms of gendered conceptualizations. It is proposed that voicing their experiences provides us glimpses of some of the oppositional forces in play in travel discourse, thus illuminating how the contradictory ideals of travelling, ethnicity and gender become a complex and contested space of value discussion. The findings suggest that Western women violate the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space; by choosing to travel and volunteer abroad, they disrupt the discourses of femininity both home and in India. These restrictions are processed and negotiated within the narrations of cultural sensitivity, independence and self-definition, consequently constructing and enhancing moral narratives of ‘self’, as well as gaining sense of control, through travel. In their negotiations for various identity positions within the travel and gender contexts, self becomes a reflexive project for the Western women.

The paper industry is one of the largest industrial sectors in India. In general, wood procurement processes play an important role in the operations of the paper industry, but there is very less research on India in this topic. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the present state of wood procurement in the Indian paper industry and finally to detect possible bottlenecks in the system. The data was collected by interviews from a total of 10 paper mills in India. Paper industry in India is entirely based on a plantation forestry, where private farming plays a very large role. Wood procurement begins with planning. The field officers cooperate with the vendors in the field. The vendors are private operators who trade directly with up to thousands of farmers and are therefore necessary for the successful operations. Wood is almost always harvested manually by axes and rarely with chain saws. Long-distance transport is mainly carried out by trucks which can carry about 15 to 20 tons of wood at a time. At the reception, the quality of the raw material and the papers are checked, and the load size is weighed. After reception, the wood is transported either to the wood yard or alternatively directly to the chipper. The load is unloaded either by loaders, or sometimes, but rarely, by hand. The results show clearly that the mills are dissatisfied with the present state of wood procurement. The biggest problem is that there the domestic supply is insufficient, which makes the wood raw material price very high and forces the industry to buy wood from abroad and longer distances which affect negatively to transport costs. In India, land ownings of farmers are also small and it complicates efficient wood procurement processes. In addition, farming trees does not interest the local people. Infrastructure is also weak and the use of trains in wood transport is difficult. Some mills stated that the policy plays too big role in determining the price of the raw material. In addition, expertise in supply chain management is weak and no suitable software is available.