Name: Arjun Banerjee
Employer and Position: Deputy Commissioner (Customs), Government of India / ABD Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Education: Master of Arts in History, University of Pune, India.
Email Address: abanerj4@vols.utk.edu / joyarjunx@gmail.com
Background: Arjun Banerjee is Deputy Commissioner of Customs (Indian Revenue Service), Government of India. He has trained and worked across four continents - Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa and has received several US government and multiple other coveted fellowships in Europe and East Asia for his work on nuclear security, nonproliferation, disarmament, and export controls. He is on sabbatical from his New Delhi, India, position working on a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). Having also served on the Advisory Committees of several University Deans, he has also taken up the mantle of Book Review Editor of UTK’s International Journal of Nuclear Security. A scholar-practitioner, Arjun loves traveling, dogs, the outdoors, photography, good music, and light reading.
Speech Title: Leader Type and Responses to State-Sponsored Terrorism. Case Study: India
Abstract: State-sponsored terrorism (SST) has long been an instrument of state policy to inflict costs on rival states without direct confrontation and maintain plausible deniability in front of a global audience. The literature on SST has so far focused primarily on the motivations, facilitating factors, and the timing of state sponsorship. The responses of victim states to SST have, however, only been glossed over. Why does state response to SST vary spatio-temporally, under different governments, or even under different leaders of the same ruling political dispensation in a country? This chapter provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of the link between leader type and response to SST by looking at examples of three Indian heads of government following the turn of the millennium under whose leadership India’s responses varied dramatically to SST provocations from neighboring Pakistan. With process tracing, I analyze the responses of Prime Ministers Vajpayee, Singh, and Modi, and connect it to the broader topic of how leader type effects responses to SST.