Every 5 years, the World Congress of the Econometric Society brings together scholars from around the world. Leading scholars present state-of-the-art overviews of their areas of research, offering newcomers access to key research in economics. Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Twelfth World Congress consists of papers and commentaries presented at the Twelfth World Congress of the Econometric Society. This two-volume set includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in economics and econometrics, and discussions of future directions for a variety of topics, covering both theory and application. The first volume addresses such topics as contract theory, industrial organization, health and human capital, as well as racial justice, while the second volume includes theoretical and applied papers on climate change, time-series econometrics, and causal inference. These papers are invaluable for experienced economists seeking to broaden their knowledge or young economists new to the field.

With the growth of international trade and commerce, there has been an increase in the number of disputes arising out of such transactions being adjudicated through arbitration. One of the problems faced in such arbitration is related to the recognition and enforcement of an arbitral award made in one country by the courts of other countries. As far as India is concerned, in the past statutory provisions on arbitration were contained in different enactments, namely the Arbitration Act, 1940; the Arbitration (Protocol and Convention) Act, 1937; and the Foreign Awards (Recognition and Enforcement) Act, 1961. The 1940 Act laid down the framework within which domestic arbitration was conducted in the country while the other two enactments dealt with foreign awards. The present legislation, the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, has repealed all three earlier Acts and has brought about many changes relating to domestic arbitration, international arbitration and the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards. However, as shown by an examination of the Foreign Awards (Recognition and Enforcement) Act, 1961, and the 1996 Act, both contain similar provisions regarding the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards.

International conventions on arbitration and the Indian law give the judiciary limited powers in the process of enforcement of arbitral awards. The scope and extent of judicial review during the process of enforcement needs critical analysis. The Law Commission of India has highlighted the pressing need to broaden the scope of challenge to arbitral awards through the amendments proposed by it.

The Starehe Boys’ Centre and School in Nairobi is an undoubted success story of charitable aid and development. It was founded in 1959 by Geoffrey Griffin, a former soldier with the King’s African Rifles who declined to renew his commission so disillusioned was he with the abuses perpetrated by the British forces during the Mau Mau Emergency. It has gone on to become one of Kenya’s most successful schools. Its pupils, who might otherwise have failed to receive anything but the most rudimentary education, have assumed leading positions in business, politics, medicine and higher education. Yet the purpose of charitable humanitarianism was to provide assistance to ultimately self-sustaining initiatives. At Starehe, charity was the ends as well as the means of humanitarian intervention. British charities continued to back it until the 1990s when it set up its own charity to ensure donations kept flowing. Starehe therefore serves as a case study for the more general phenomenon of how charity obtained an unintended permanent presence in development work in Africa.

Arbitration as an ADR mechanism has gained wide acceptance among the business community since the 1990s. In a world of increasing trade and commerce, it has become a sophisticated dispute settlement mechanism for deciding domestic and international disputes. One of the objectives of arbitration law is to provide for a procedure which is fair, efficient and capable of meeting the specific needs of arbitration. In India, the law governing arbitration is the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996. As is the case with any current-day arbitration statute, this Act, while recognising the concept of ‘party autonomy’, does prescribe the procedure for the conduct of arbitral proceedings in some form or other. The parties are given the freedom to agree on the procedure to be followed by the arbitral tribunal, on the language to be used and on the time for filing the statements of claim and defence. The principles of natural justice have been made equally applicable to proceedings before the arbitral tribunal. These include the right to hearing, written proceedings before the arbitral tribunal and seeking assistance of the courts in taking evidence. The earlier Indian Arbitration Act of 1940 did not contain any specific provision relating to the applicability of the CPC, or the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, but the 1996 Act specifically excludes their applicability while setting out the basic principles that govern arbitral procedure. The arbitrators, as impartial judges, have to follow the equality rule in every phase of the arbitral proceedings.

International trade occupies a prime place in the economies of all countries. Developing countries are particularly eager to promote their trade with a view to earning much-needed foreign exchange for financing imports of the latest technology, scientific know-how and sophisticated goods and services from economically and industrially advanced countries. Apart from economic factors, which are no doubt important, the development of international trade on a sustained and enduring basis primarily depends on the confidence and familiarity of international traders with the commercial, legal and arbitration systems of the countries of their trading partners. It is also essential to ensure the proper and timely execution of trade contracts without disputes or disruption in the best interests of the business community. Different countries have differing legal and arbitration systems. Conflict of laws and disparities in the dispute settlement procedures in different jurisdictions have posed practical hurdles in the way of the smooth and swift flow of international trade. Therefore, efforts have been made time and again at the international level to overcome such difficulties and problems through harmonisation and unification of arbitration law and procedures in different parts of the world.

Arbitration establishes a web of contracts between the parties, arbitral institutions and arbitrators. International arbitration cases involve private commercial disputes and arbitral decisions are not binding on third parties.

While Donald Trump's ruthless, reckless, aggressive, multi-pronged assaults are threatening American democracy in unprecedented ways, India nevertheless stands out when viewed against broader trends of democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Since 2014, liberal democracy in India has come under increasing pressure from Hindu nationalism. Commentators and scholars who are sympathetic to liberal democracy express grave concern, if not alarm, about the state of Indian democracy: ‘The blaze is at our door’ (A. Roy 2022) and ‘The Hindu Rashtra [Hindu Nation] is … indeed underway’ (Jaffrelot 2019a, p. 64). One writes that ‘India's Democracy Is Dying’ and notes that democracy watch organizations now classify India as a ‘hybrid regime’, an ‘electoral autocracy’ or a ‘flawed democracy’ (Tudor 2023).

Electoral democracy remains intact in India, but civil freedoms, minority rights, and institutional constraints on executive power have been substantially weakened (Varshney 2022), and ‘India's standing as an inclusive, diverse nation with an independent judiciary, rule of law and free media was degraded’ (Patel 2021, p. 460).

During the past decade, prime minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has ‘tethered religious nationalism to right-wing populism’ (Basu 2021, p. 278) and prioritized Hindu nationalism over the Indian constitution, as ‘an ideology that promotes the idea that Hinduism is the authentic religious and cultural identity of the Indian people’ (Yilmaz and Morieson 2023, p. 185). ‘The BJP has thus moved Hindutva beyond right-wing nationalism and toward a civilisational struggle between Hindus and “others”’ (ibid., p. 198).

Hindu–Muslim antagonism is one of the main, if not the main, features of the Sangh Parivar's politics. For a long time, this antagonism was considered merely in religious terms. Despite the presence of extensive literature on the economic features and implications of contemporary Hindutva (Bobbio 2017; Chacko 2019; Desai 2011; Gopalakrishnan 2009, 2006; Iwanek 2014; Karat 2014; Kaul 2017; Kumar 2018; Nanda 2011; Patnaik 2019; Saxena and Sharma 1998; Siddiqui 2017; Sinha and Nayak 2021; Spodek 2010), there is a widespread tendency among scholars to consider the Hindu–Muslim rivalry as connected to identity, religious, or communal factors. This chapter aims to prove that an intimate connection between communal and economic factors existed from the colonial period and that communal strife was not determined by religious but by economic causes. It adds to Gyanendra Pandey's (1999) masterly demonstration of how the British constructed communalism by leveraging economic forces. However, Pandey examines only the economic and social transformations brought about by colonization, but does not consider the interrelation between economic and identity factors as part of the colonial game that I foreground in this chapter.

The chapter explains how the British colonizers deliberately targeted Muslim rulers, who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the main political and economic competitors of the East India Company (EIC), and that, in order to undermine the powers of the Muslim rulers, they implemented both economic and cultural devices, as well as military and political ones.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.