Thomas, Raju G.C. 1940–

PERSONAL: Born February 21, 1940, in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India; immigrated to United States, naturalized citizen, 1986; married, wife's name, Suzanne. Education: University of Bombay, B.A., 1960, M.A. (industrial and monetary economics), 1962; London School of Economics, B.Sc.Econ., 1965; University of Southern California, M.A. (international relations), 1972; University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES: Home—Glendale, WI. Office—Dept. of Political Science, Marquette University, P.O. Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Commercial executive with Forbes, Forbes, Campbell & Company, Bombay, India, and Avery India Limited, Calcutta, India, 1965–68; Hofstra University, New York, NY, lecturer in political science, 1974–75; Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, assistant professor, 1976, associate professor, 1981–86, assistant department chairman, 1985–88, professor of political science, 1986–, codirector of UW-Milwaukee/Marquette Center for International Studies, 1994–97, Allis Chalmers Distinguished Professor of International Affairs, 2000–. National Advisory Council on South Asian Affairs, Washington, DC, vice chairman, 1996–; lecturer worldwide. University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California, visiting associate professor, summer, 1983; Marquette University, acting department chairman, summers, 1987, 1989; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visiting scholar, 1988–89.

MEMBER: International Institute for Strategic Studies, International Studies Association, American Political Science Association, Association for the Study of Nationalities, Association for Asian Studies, Arms Control Association, Indian Council of World Affairs, London School of Economics Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Ford Foundation fellow, 1980–81; Institute for the Study of World Politics grant, 1982–83; Research Institute on International Change research grant, 1985–86; Marquette University summer faculty fellowships, 1987, 1991; Harvard University fellow, 1988–89; International Institute for Strategic Studies grant, 1991–92; U.S. Institute of Peace grant, 1991–92; Los Alamos National Laboratory grant, 1991; National Endowment for the Humanities grant, 1995.

WRITINGS:

The Defence of India: A Budgetary Perspective of Strategy and Politics, Macmillan (Delhi, India), 1978.

(Editor) The Great-Power Triangle and Asian Security, Lexington Books (Lexington, MA), 1983.

Indian Security Policy, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1986.

(Editor, with Bennett Ramberg) Energy and Security in the Industrializing World, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 1990.

(Editor) Perspectives on Kashmir: The Roots of Conflict in South Asia, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1992.

(Editor, with H. Richard Friman) The South Slav Conflict: History, Religion, Ethnicity, and Nationalism ("Garland Reference Library of Social Science" series), Garland (New York, NY), 1996.

Democracy, Security, and Development in India, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) The Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with Amit Gupta) India's Nuclear Security, Lynne Rienner (Boulder, CO), 2000.

(Editor, with D.R. SarDesai) Nuclear India in the Twenty-first Century, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor and contributor) Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention, Lexington Books (Lanham, MD), 2003.

Contributor to books by others, including Exiting the Balkan Thicket, edited by Gary Dempsey, CATO Institute Press (Washington, DC), 2001, and The New Balkans: Disintegration and Reconstruction, edited by George Kourvetaris and Victor Roudometof, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002; contributor to journals, including World Affairs, Mediterranean Quarterly, Washington Quarterly, Harvard International Review, Survival, Nuclear Times, Asian Survey, Journal of Strategic Studies, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and Pacific Affairs.

WORK IN PROGRESS: With Stanley Wolpert, Encyclopedia of India, four volumes.

SIDELIGHTS: As a professor of international affairs, Raju G.C. Thomas is a scholar of international politics, security, and the global economy, particularly as it relates to his native India. In addition to his teaching responsibilities and role as a lecturer at schools in the United States and abroad, Thomas has written extensively on his area of expertise and has published books as well as edited collections of works by other writers on contemporary world affairs.

In Energy and Security in the Industrializing World Thomas and coeditor Bennett Ramberg present "a valuable collection of analysis … and data" on the energy policy and national security of such nations as India, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea, according to New Scientist contributor Michael Grubb. The book details such issues as links to nuclear weapons programs, oil scarcity and consequent price fluctuations, and the political rhetoric revolving around each nation's position on nuclear weaponry. While Grubb found the collection to be somewhat dated, he also praised the "consistency in the way these issues are approached."

Based on a series of lectures Thomas gave in the early 1990s, Democracy, Security, and Development in India focuses on the efforts of India to deal with national security, civil liberties, and a developing economy in the years since it gained its independence from Great Britain. Noting that the "Indian experiment" goes against the commonly held belief that there exists "a strong association between development and democracy," Political Science Quarterly contributor Stephen Philip Cohen commended Thomas's book because it "asks the right questions and tentatively offers some answers to one of the great emerging questions … the survival of a democratic India."

Thomas and D.R. SarDesai coedited Nuclear India in the Twenty-first Century, the contributors to which met in Los Angeles after the 1998 test in India. The Indian, American, British, and French authors probe the desirability of nuclear testing and whether India should have taken this step. Individual chapters discuss weaponry and comparisons of nuclear programs, and the book includes a condensed version of George Perkovich's 1999 book India's Nuclear Bomb, which provides an introduction to the issue and examines events leading up to India's 1974 nuclear test. Arabinda Acharya wrote in Contemporary Southeast Asia that Nuclear India in the Twenty-first Century "is an attempt to reassess India's nuclear weapons programme from a strategic, political, technological, and economic perspective."

Thomas is the editor of and contributor to Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention, a collection by scholars—nearly all American—who closely study the dissolution of Yugoslavia. As Andrew C. Janos noted in Perspectives on Political Science, "Most of the chapters are well researched and richly annotated. Although this by itself does not validate their arguments, it does testify to the seriousness of the enterprise and hence cannot be overlooked easily in debates about Balkan politics and the larger issue of humanitarian interventionism."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Political Science Review, March, 1988, Aaron Karp, review of Indian Security Policy, p. 349; March, 1999, George H. Quester, review of The Nuclear Non-proliferation Regime: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century, p. 245.

Contemporary Southeast Asia, December, 2002, Arabinda Acharya, review of Nuclear India in the Twenty-first Century, p. 621.

New Scientist, March 23, 1991, Michael Grubb, review of Energy and Security in the Industrializing World, p. 53.

Pacific Affairs, summer, 2003, Robert S. Anderson, review of Nuclear India in the Twenty-first Century, p. 317.

Perspectives on Political Science, spring, 2004, Andrew C. Janos, review of Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention, p. 116.

Political Science Quarterly, spring, 1998, Stephen Philip Cohen, review of Democracy, Security, and Development in India, p. 156.

Studies in Comparative International Development, summer, 1998, Sumit Ganguly, review of Democracy, Security, and Development in India, p. 125.