 The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. The elections to the 543-member lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha) with an electorate, numbering 968 million eligible voters, assumes critical importance as India is going through both internal and external changes that are heavily linked to its rising power aspirations and achievements. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been campaigning on the claim that under his leadership, India’s global status has improved substantially and that he is determined to make India a great power and developed country by 2047, the centenary year of independence. The growing Hindu middle class seems to agree. According to a February 2023 Pew survey, Modi had a 79% favorable approval rating. More interestingly, some 85% of Indians surveyed by Pew think a strong authoritarian leader or military rule is preferable to multi-party electoral democracy, the highest for any country surveyed. Since its economic liberalization in 1991, in terms of comprehensive national power, including both hard and soft power markers, India has made substantial progress—in some areas more than in others—even though it still lags behind China in many indicators of material power and social welfare. The critical factor is the steady economic growth rate ranging from 6 to 8% over the past three decades. The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030. The tactical and strategic advantages India has made under somewhat favorable geopolitical circumstances are many, but these could easily erode if its soft power foundations, especially democracy, secularism, and federalism, decline even further. The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030. The implications of the elections to India’s rise as an inclusive democratic state is potentially far reaching. If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state. India’s status advancement in recent years has benefitted the ruling establishment. Modi’s achievements are built on the foundations laid by the previous Congress Party-led governments of Prime Ministers P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh. India’s 2005 rapprochement with the US and its opening to the world, especially to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, occurred during that period. It was Rao and his Finance Minister Singh who opened the Indian economy to the world through their wide-ranging economic reforms in 1991. The economic growth was also very robust during much of Singh’s tenure. Many of the social programs were started during that period, but Modi has improved on their delivery by introducing direct transfer and also adding new welfare programs guaranteeing the poor subsided rations and cooking gas. Some 300 million Indians were lifted out of extreme poverty during Singh’s term in office alone, and a similar number may have come out during BJP rule. Yet India still hosts some 12% of its 1.4 billion population below the poverty line (considered as $2 a day) while 84% have an income less than $7 a day. If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state. The previous Congress regime’s inability to cash in on their achievements for electoral gains is in direct contrast to Modi’s success in presenting a different image to the public on India’s economic and military achievements and general international status advancement. Skillful propaganda, especially using social media, has enabled this. India’s swing power role in the Indo-Pacific, in terms of balancing China’s rise and aggressive behavior, has helped India’s geopolitical prominence and Modi has astutely used it for his own electoral successes. He has used contentious religious nationalism, including the building of a temple in Ayodhya over a destroyed Muslim mosque, repealing the Article 370 of the Constitution which gave Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous status, and adding programs to allow citizenship to displaced minorities (excluding Muslims) from neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, to solidify his support among ardent Hindu-nationalist groups. The 18 million-strong Indian diaspora contains many pro-Hindu groups that have helped Modi’s efforts by offering financial and moral support. Although the rising power claim may have helped Modi’s possible third term re-election, there is another side to this story. Some of the BJP government’s internal policies may, in the long-run, undercut the status achievement by putting its legitimacy and sustainability in question. The number one challenge is the democratic backslide that has been happening under the BJP rule. Today India is ranked at 66 as a ‘partly free country’ by Freedom House, and the rating agency V-Dem recently demoted India as an ‘electoral autocracy.’ A number of measures curtailing freedom of expression and other essential democratic rights have occurred under Modi, denting India’s democratic credentials, one of its key soft power assets. Similarly, secularism, another soft power marker of India since independence, has been reduced as there is a direct effort to assert the Hindu majoritarianism as visualized by the BJP and its militant ideological arm, the Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). The democratic backsliding presages considerable difficulties to legitimizing India’s status as a liberal democratic rising power. The major challenges to freedom of expression, the party’s increasing ideological control of India’s judiciary, and the attacks on minority rights, as well as harassment an arrest of opposition leaders using governmental agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate, all portend the emergence of an illiberal state even when elections are held periodically. While Hindutva (Hindu-ness) aimed at the hegemony of Hinduism over all other religious groups has increasing sympathy among the Hindu electorate and sections of the diaspora, it is still to obtain any international traction as an attractive ideology or model for political order. It is yet to offer a coherent and convincing agenda for the emerging world order. The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas such as Ahimsa (non-violence), among others, to develop his model of non-violent struggle. Can Modi in his third term make a conscious effort to develop India as an inclusive, democratic state, and bring peaceful and tolerant aspects of Hinduism to the fore? Or will Indian democratic exceptionalism evolve into an entrenched populist majoritarian system with all its attendant challenges for democratic freedoms, even while India makes substantial material progress? The simultaneous democratic backsliding in many countries, including the US and Europe, does not help India’s prospects in this regard. India may still receive a higher geopolitical position (in the context of China’s rise) and the steady economic growth that would allow it to emerge as a key destination for trade and foreign investment, and a source of technically qualified workforce and migrants for the next two decades or more. India’s greater inclusion in global governance is needed for reasons of equity, efforts at solving many collective action problems, and greater effectiveness of international institutions. The peaceful accommodation of India will alter the historical patterns of rise and fall of great powers through war. Whether it will be a peaceful process internally is yet to be determined. The forthcoming elections will establish India’s trajectory in a colossal way both for its domestic politics and foreign relations. Feature image by Graphic Gears on Unsplash, public domain OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Pay attention to your children You’ve probably been ignoring your children. This isn’t simply you not paying attention to them because you’re distracted or need to do something. You don’t know what your children like and dislike. You don’t know their names and ages. You probably haven’t even acknowledged the existence of some of your children. You may be thinking “How could I not know how many children I have?” or “I don’t even have children!” and find the assertion that you’re ignoring and don’t know your children as outlandish. But equally bizarre is the fact that your children don’t know you. How can this be? Your children are in foster care. Before you argue, let me explain. I know that you may not have a biological or adopted child who’s in foster care. But you still have children in foster care. When the state determines that a child’s parents or caregivers are not able to care and provide for a child, the state can remove the child from their home and place them in foster care. At this point, the state assumes the responsibility of parenting the child. The state uses money from taxpayers to provide for the child while in foster care. As taxpayers, you and I have a responsibility to the children in foster care. Our money is supporting the foster care system. It is our foster care system. And the children in foster care are our children. Most children in foster care will be reunified with family. Some will be adopted. Other will enter a guardianship. However, not all children receive permanency. Some remain in foster care until they are adults. Eventually, these young adults who do not obtain permanency—through no faults of their own—leave foster care. These young adults are often referred to as “youth aging out” or “care leavers.” Research consistently finds that compared to their peers who have not been in foster care, those who are “aging out” of foster care have poorer outcomes across multiple domains, including education, employment, housing, health, mental health, substance use, justice system involvement, and early parenting. As they are leaving foster care and entering adulthood, many of these young adults experience hardship and encounter structural barriers. These young adults typically lack support and resources as they age out. How is this a concern to you? The current social norm is that parents support their children during the transition into adulthood. Parents of young adults often provide their children a place to live, assist with paying bills, help in times of crisis, offer encouragement, and provide guidance. Most young adults are not told by their parents “you’re on your own” on their 18th birthday when the state recognizes them as adults. However, when someone in foster care enters adulthood, they can find themselves without support. They may lose access to resources and services. There are some areas where extended foster care is available, allowing a young person to remain in foster care. However, not all young adults decide to remain in foster care. Other programs may be available based on where a young person is aging out and their life circumstances; however, many young people aging out still struggle. These are our children aging out of foster care. To be consistent with the social norms, we should help those who are aging navigate the transition to adulthood. There are many ways that taxpayers can help young people aging out. First and foremost, we need to know about the young people in and aging out of foster care and recognize the importance of helping them. How each of us helps these young people is going to vary based on our resources and abilities. The ways we make a difference and help young people aging out of foster care are practically endless. It all starts with us adopting the mindset that children in foster care are our children and that we must pay attention to our children. Featured image by Aditya Romansa via Unsplash, public domain. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened. Troubled by the often-misinformed efforts to make institutional change that we saw around us, we wanted to take action that was both specific to our disciplinary context and wide-reaching in its effects. We started with an article in the flagship linguistics journal, Language, calling for the centering of racial justice within the discipline. That article was the lead piece in the journal’s Perspectives section and was accompanied by a range of responses from linguists worldwide, which we responded to in turn. We wrote with the hope that institutional change could start from the individual and (especially) collective actions of linguists. We were also motivated by the hope that the discipline our students will enter will be radically different from the one that we have spent our careers within. This hope fueled our work for the next several years, as we collaborated with linguists within and beyond linguistics departments and throughout the academy to create concrete, specific, and action-centered models for how to do the work necessary to transform the discipline. The results of this intensive collaborative process are two companion volumes, Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, and their websites, which provide additional information and resources. Some linguists, particularly those for whom linguistics is structured and whom it best serves, may be asking themselves, “What’s so bad about linguistics in its current form?” Many linguists we interacted with as we embarked on this project were defensive, baffled, or even outright hostile. Fortunately, many others were curious and eager to learn how the discipline could do better and what they could do to help. Most importantly, the people for whom we do this work—those who have been made to feel unwelcome in linguistics and who have been shut out, pushed out, or relegated to the disciplinary margins, as well as those who have succeeded despite rather than because of linguistics-as-usual—understood and welcomed our project. Many of these current, former, and would-be linguists have been engaged in like-minded efforts of their own. Some critics see our work as “politicizing” linguistics. But these commenters miss the point that linguistics (and academia) has always been political. The discipline has its roots in empire and the colonizing practices of categorizing and classifying languages in order to control those who use them. As the discipline has taken shape over the centuries to the present day, linguistics has become a field limited by its own exclusionary practices and ideologies—a field that, in our view, is simply too small. In Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, we envision and work to build a linguistics that is capacious and welcoming, particularly to those whose lived experiences give them fresh and much-needed insights into the kinds of questions linguistics should be asking, the kinds of methods it should be using, and the kinds of real-world impacts it should be making. Inclusion in linguisticsMost linguists are familiar with the concept of inclusion through institutional discourse in academia and elsewhere, particularly the acronym DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) or its many variants. Too often, however, inclusion is used to mean recruiting members of formerly excluded groups into often hostile institutions, without making significant changes to the workings of the institutions themselves. True inclusion is not a matter of making space within existing institutions for new people to do the same old thing. Instead, true inclusion requires the transformation not only of who is in institutional spaces but what they do, how, and why. Transformation demands that we ask ourselves who is and isn’t present in linguistics, whether they have full and equitable access, and whether the community of linguists will value their full humanity, rather than treating them merely as sources of linguistic data or as token representatives and spokespersons for the groups to which they belong. Inclusion in Linguistics offers abundant examples of how linguists can and already are creating genuine inclusion within the discipline. The authors challenge limited notions of who gets to be included, calling attention to a wide range of groups who remain marginalized on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender identity, disability, geography, language, class and caste, and more. The authors issue a powerful call for a linguistics that does not simply make space for but purposefully centers those who have been excluded. We collectively urge linguists to think bigger, to abandon long-cherished ideological investments in what is and isn’t legitimate within linguistics, and to build a discipline that doesn’t hide in the ivory tower but engages with the world and makes it a better place. Decolonizing linguisticsCompared to inclusion, decolonization may be a less familiar concept to many linguists. Some academics in the US may have first encountered the idea, along with related concepts like settler colonialism, through student activism on their campus in recent years and months. (In fact, the New York Times recently published an explainer on the term settler colonialism, assuming—no doubt correctly—that its predominantly white, liberal, and highly educated readership is not well versed in decolonial theory and activism.) We chose the title Decolonizing Linguistics to invoke the long and ongoing history of linguists’ global academic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people and the discipline-based extraction of their languages for professional and economic gain. Contributors identify some of the forms of colonialism that linguistics has taken and continues to take. We emphasize the importance of Black-centered and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in undoing colonizing structures. We also highlight community-driven collaborative projects that provide a comprehensive picture of the powerful social and scholarly impacts of an unsettled, decolonized linguistics. Both volumes offer specific roadmaps and pathways for how to advance social justice, through programs, partnerships, curricula, and other initiatives. Our work is a necessary first step toward institutional and disciplinary change: a linguistics built by, around, and for groups that have confronted colonization, oppression, and exclusion—that is, precisely the people whose languages so often fascinate linguists—is also a linguistics that prioritizes the new ideas and practices that these groups bring to the discipline and recognizes these new directions as precisely where linguistics needs to go. We do not consider Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics as definitive statements but rather as an invitation for others to join us in ongoing conversations. We invite linguistics scholars and students, educators and higher education leaders, around the world to engage with the ideas in both volumes with an eye toward what you can do in your own local context, what we have inevitably left out, and how you might build on, adapt, and push us forward to create the kind of inclusive, decolonized, and socially just linguistics that you would like to be part of. Featured image by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline] The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the culmination of a number of growing fissures and collisions in the region—between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe and Russia, and Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage, a historian and former diplomat who served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State where he handled the Russia/Ukraine portfolio, looks at the origins of this conflict dating back to 24 August 1991. Feature image by Max Kukurudziak via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’ Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity. Left behind for 20 years while Odysseus spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and then a further ten years on his meandering journey home to Ithaca, Penelope is faced with multiple challenges in her husband’s absence. Her story, although it comes from a millennia-old tale set in a mythical past, echoes some of the experiences undergone by military spouses in contemporary society. We can also find in Homer’s Penelope an ancient archetype for the idealised image of the ‘model military wife’ which still persists in the modern world. In her husband’s absence, the Odyssey’s Penelope is faced with a whole array of emotional and practical struggles, many of which modern-day military spouses might recognise. The poet describes how she has trouble sleeping, worries crowding her mind as she lies in bed at night (Odyssey 19.513-17), and frequently throughout the poem she is to be found weeping, overwhelmed by the grief and stress of her situation. This mythical waiting wife has no idea whether her husband is alive or dead—he is what we might describe today as ‘missing in action’—and if or when he might return home to her. Modern military spouses often talk about the dread of the ‘knock on the door’ bringing bad news while their partner is in a war zone: Penelope too is simultaneously desperate for news of Odysseus but living in constant fear of what that news might reveal. At the same time, she must deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of being home alone: parenting the child, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy, and managing the household alone. In this patriarchal ancient society, the absence of the male head of the royal household is felt especially strongly. Nonetheless, there are parallels here with contemporary situations; when a partner is away on active duty, their spouse must often take on domestic responsibilities which would ordinarily be shared. Penelope’s already difficult situation is exacerbated by the presence of 108 suitors, who are vying for her hand in marriage—a marriage which would also grant them Odysseus’ kingly power, his possessions, and his estate. It is her response to this situation which cemented her reputation for fidelity in the ancient world; that response also enables her to demonstrate her resourcefulness. In her hope that Odysseus will eventually return, and in order to buy time, Penelope deploys what in the ancient world is a typically feminine stratagem: she tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What her suitors don’t know is that she is unpicking each day’s weaving in secret every night. The shroud trick not only keeps Penelope occupied during much of Odysseus’ absence, but it also represents a life which has been placed on hold while he is away. Both the notion of ‘keeping busy’ as a coping strategy and the feeling of being unable to move forward with their own lives—with career plans or education, for example—while awaiting the return of a serving partner are recurring elements of the first-hand accounts of modern-day waiting wives. Yet it is not merely some of the day-to-day elements of Penelope’s life that might feel familiar to contemporary military spouses. There is a broader sense in which this ‘myth’ of the model military wife is fundamental to upholding the patriarchal structures which still endure in some military institutions. In modern UK and US contexts, the armed forces still rely heavily on the support of the spouses of personnel. Those spouses are still overwhelmingly female, despite the fact that women and same-sex couples are now eligible for military service. The feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her 2000 book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, set out a lengthy list—which still holds up almost 25 years after first publication—of the ideal characteristics of today’s ‘model military wife.’ This is someone who, among other things, is unfailingly supportive and content for all aspects of her life to be subordinated to her husband’s military role, and who, like Penelope, is both faithful and resourceful in coping alone for long periods of time while her partner is away on deployment. Moreover, the model military wife is expected to do all of this without complaint. The focus of policy-makers, media reporting, and the military itself, still rests predominantly on combatants themselves. The voices of those whose lives are also profoundly affected by their partners’ career choice are often silenced. Similarly, in the Odyssey Penelope is given little room to share her experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the poem than when the couple are finally reunited. Here only four lines (Odyssey 23.302-5) are set aside to summarise Penelope’s story; by comparison, despite the fact that the majority of the poem’s 12,000 lines describe Odysseus’ exploits, 32 lines (Odyssey 23.310-41)—eight times as much space—are devoted to recalling his adventures. If at times the warrior’s wife takes up less space, both in Homer’s poetry and in the minds of the public today, that should merely make us more determined to give her more of our attention. Featured image: ‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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