While the arrest of Ashley Tellis may have put the spotlight on think tanks and the professional perils that policy scholars might confront in an era of volatile geopolitics, it is also a truism that this community is at the forefront of shaping and influencing national and global policies, particularly in critical areas of strategic affairs, economics and energy, to name a few. Far from an elite, closed group of ‘thinkers’ in the earlier years, think tanks have metamorphosed into not just ‘ideating’ shops, but have proliferated, both in numbers as well as in terms of role and influence, across national and global governance systems. In this fourth edition of Glimpses from an Eastern Window, Professor Shantanu Chakrabarti provides a survey of the think tank phenomena.
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The recent arrest by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of a senior American strategic affairs scholar of Indian-origin, Ashley J. Tellis, on the charge of illegally possessing sensitive government documents has brought to the forefront issues related to the sensitive linkages between individual scholars, private think-tanks (a popular term to describe policy research institutes) and the state.
Ashley J. Tellis was an expert on Indian and South Asian affairs who had worked in Washington think-tanks and diplomatic circles for more than 20 years. He was arrested earlier this month after the FBI searched his residence and found a trove of classified records in a basement home office area.
Tellis was holding the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the reputed American think tank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), a position he had held since the establishment of the Chair in 2017.
Image: The headquarters of CEIP (left) and Rand Corporation (right)
In a recent statement, Carnegie has stated that Tellis has been sent on leave after being arrested by the FBI. According to Katelynn Vogt, vice president (communications) of the US-based think tank, "We are aware of the allegations against Ashley J Tellis. He is now on administrative leave, including from his role as Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs.
Tellis, of course, has denied leakage of any secret or sensitive information to the Chinese and other sources. His defence attorneys, John Nassikas and Deborah Curtis, stated in a court filing that, “regrettably, investigators appeared to interpret his routine professional duties, such as liaison work and international travel, as clandestine activity, reading something sinister into what were standard think-tank and scholarly foreign policy engagements.”
Think-tanks in global affairs: complexities and drivers
Tellis’s example, however, brings us to a larger question about the role of think tanks in policy making and their sensitive links with government sources.
First employed as a nickname for the brain along with “think box” in the 1940s, according to several slang dictionaries, the term ‘think tank’ took on a new meaning during the early 1960s when it first appeared in magazines and newspapers as a description for RAND and other similar civilian military research groups.
Image: Arundel House (left), the headquarters of the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) and Chatham House (right), both in London
While think tanks as organisations elude a simple definition, it is not difficult to see their proliferation and influence over vital sectors in policymaking, including foreign and strategic affairs, over time. The Post-Cold War period has witnessed a rapid rise in the number of think tanks in the ‘non-West’ parts of the world.
A key research area of these think tanks has been global affairs and security. According to one global survey carried out in 2014, for instance, 12 of the world's top 20 think tanks and approximately 60 of the top 100 think tanks specialised in foreign affairs. For many, if not most of the remainder, international issues of some variety featured prominently on their agenda.
As the global order develops more complexities, there is commensurate intensification in the search for answers or solutions. Apart from governments and state institutions, think tanks across the globe are at the forefront of this quest.
Tracing their origins in western Europe (particularly Great Britain) and the USA, most analysts regard the post-First World period as the take-off period for these organisations.
Scholars like Priscilla Roberts further trace back the origin of think tanks specialising in international relations to the establishment of the Royal United Services Institution (currently, the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies), which was founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington as an independent professional body to study military and strategic issues.
Whatever may have caused their origins, scholars studying this phenomenon identify at least four waves in the pattern of think tank growth around the world:
The Anglo-American tradition regards think tanks as relatively ‘autonomous’ organisations with a separate legal identity that engage in the analysis of policy issues, independent of government, political parties and pressure groups. The notion that a think tank requires independence from the state in order to be “free-thinking,” it has been argued, is essentially an Anglo-American norm that does not translate well into other political cultures.
Such theoretical explanations, however, fail to capture the true history of close coordination and mutual support between existing governments and important think tanks in the Western tradition itself. Such analyses of Western-based scholars are often subjective, not based on actual facts and reality.
Think tanks, originating in the West, were never truly autonomous in nature and were always created with agendas, egged on by interventionist ideologies. Inderjeet Parmar, for instance, has shown how the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (popularly known as the Chatham House) after the First World War and their increasing prominence during the inter-war period played a major role in the re-orientation of the post-War outlook of the United States and Britain.
Image: The list of top 40 global think tanks as in the UoP Global Go To Think Tank Index, 2021. This list has more or less remained unchanged since the beginning of this survey, but for some changes in the pecking order.
“The changing structure of the world power alone”, argues Parmar, “did not and could not ‘determine’ of what postwar US and British foreign policy looked like: organisations of conviction-led men (and a small number of women), with a vision of world order and the willingness and ability to act, were fundamental to the transitions that both countries went through.
In another interesting essay, scholars Shuhong Ho and Inderjeet Parmar give a detailed analysis of how the prominent US-based think tank, the Ford Foundation, had played a major role in introducing Western capitalist models and management styles in China through direct and indirect sponsoring of scholars and think tanks.
Ford’s principal advantage is its formally private non-state character, a convenient fiction that enables it to move more freely than American state agencies into politically sensitive spaces and politically taboo subjects. Those spaces for ‘Track II’ diplomacy, informal but semi-official in practice, independent of but authorised by both states, were fundamental to China’s shift to a market-oriented economy, they point out.
In a more hard-hitting style, Hamid Dabashi argues:
“The transmutation of classical Orientalism to Area Studies and thence into disposable knowledge produced at US and European think tanks, I propose, was coterminous with the rise of an empire without hegemony. This epistemic endosmosis – or interested knowledge manufactured in think tanks and percolating into the public domain – is, I suggest, conducive to various modes of disposable knowledge production, predicated on no enduring or coherent episteme, but, in fact, modelled on disposable commodities that provide instant gratification and are then disposed of after one use only.”
Image: Top think tanks in the subcategory of China, India, Japan and South Korea (left) in the UoP Global Go To Think Tank Index, and the list showing country-wise numbers (right) with some of the top think tanks.
The India story
Think tanks have proliferated in India, keeping pace with similar global trends. According to the Global Go To Think Tank Index Report 2020 rankings (the last of the series which was not published since the demise of James G. McGann of The Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania), India has pipped UK to reach third position in ranking with an estimated number of 612 think tanks while the USA and China continue to hold onto their first and second ranks with estimated number of 2203 and 1413 think tanks, respectively.
In a list consisting of the top-ranking 174 think tanks located across the globe (both US and non-US), the 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report lists nine Indian think tanks. In another ranking index in the same Report, listing 63 think tanks in terms of generating ‘best New Idea or Paradigm Developed by a Think Tank’, 6 Indian think tanks are included.
In another list of prominent think tanks compiled by the Nippon Institute of Research Advancement (NIRA) of 450 relevant institutions and think tanks in almost 100 countries and regions throughout the world, 6 Indian think tanks are included.
The Narendra Modi government’s approach of active engagement vis-à-vis selected think tanks has partly lowered the barriers to access to information for these organisations. In a move considered to be encouraging for the think tanks by analysts like Raphaëlle Khan and Patrick Köllner, Prime Minister Modi, in June 2014, indicated his openness to fresh thinking, arguing that “the input of intellectual think tanks” should be substantially enhanced for a better policy framework.
Think tanks were thus officially recognised in India as sources of policy advice or, at least, as providers of relevant expertise. In practice, some organisations have come to enjoy better access to information, the duo had highlighted.
Image: India's Foreign Secretary, Vikram Misri (left) and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar (right), at the Raisina Dialogue, annually organised by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).
This growth, however, is limited as Khan and Kollner further argue, pointing out that the newly proliferating Indian think tanks could be clubbed into two broad categories: those close to Indian businesses and/or connected to foreign think tanks, and those considered to be ideologically close to the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP and its related organisations. This evolution seems to denote the increasing power of Hindu nationalism and of business groups in India (rather than a general pluralisation of the landscape of think tanks) and has several implications regarding the level of autonomy and the roles of these think tanks.
This analysis, however, misses out on the branches of prominent global think tanks that managed to set up offices in India in recent times, like, for instance, the Brookings India (2013) and Carnegie India (2016).
The proximity to the government has also helped in ensuring a phenomenal rise in foreign funding for some of the prominent Indian private think tanks.
Palak Shah brings to focus the case of Reliance-funded Observer Research Foundation (ORF) in a commentary for Businessworld, in particular, the extent of its foreign funding, including from entities close to the US State Department and Pentagon. “The institution’s budget, now estimated at Rs 25 crore annually, has ballooned, with foreign funding spiking dramatically since the Raisina Dialogue’s inception in 2016… This isn’t pocket change—it’s a financial arsenal, arming ORF to shape India’s strategic discourse with a global megaphone,” Shah contends.
With numerous foreign think tanks chipping in funds along with expertise and data, along with direct funding on behalf of various foreign governments and international agencies, Shah expresses his wariness as to the exact role and influence of such ‘foreign parties’ in directing and shaping indigenous policymaking and agenda.
Image: Buildings of the Vivekananda International Foundation (left), ORF (centre), and the Sapru House (right), which houses the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), all located in New Delhi.
One major cause behind such trends is the obvious fact that the American experience and shibboleths defining a ‘think tank’ culture has continued to profoundly influence the evolution, agenda and working style of evolving think tanks, across the globe, with India not being an exception. But one must not forget that the think tank culture had originated and evolved in India during the colonial period.
Major gaps, however, exist, related to the growth and evolution of Indian think tanks, particularly those involved in studies related to international relations or foreign policy analyses.
Analyst Annapoorna Ravichander narrates that the first Indian think tank was the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune in 1930, with others coming up during the 1930s and 1940s. It is important to trace the historical origins of a ‘think tank culture’ in India in order to understand the competition involved in projecting India by the colonial regime and its sympathisers and the indigenous attempts to counter it with alternative visions.
Scholars like Martin J. Bayly (2017) and Vineet Thakur and Alexander E. Davis (2017) have published on the nature and growth of indigenous think tanks dealing with foreign affairs and international relations during the colonial period. The latter study, for instance, places particular focus on the competition and rivalry between the Indian Institute of International Affairs (IIIA), a branch of the Chatham House set up in 1936, and the nationalist dominated Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) in 1943.
However, there exists further scope of researching this extremely interesting and diverse field and in connecting the past with post-independence developments.
The need to ‘indigenise’ knowledge and thinking
To conclude, one must stress the fact that a simple rise in numbers cannot sufficiently ensure the efficacy of the new generation Indian think tanks. Developing core values and an indigenous focus remains an important task if the indigenous think tanks want to establish any global prominence.
This is becoming an important objective amongst the rising powers across the world. The Chinese leader Xi Jinping, for instance, views the task of developing “a new type of think tank with Chinese characteristics” as essential to China's ability to compete with the United States.
India, too, has witnessed a sharp proliferation in the number of think tanks during the post-Cold Cold period. A significant number of these entities are known to be chapters or branches of Western (predominantly American or European) or local institutions receiving substantial funding (and perhaps policy and agenda directives) from major Western institutions.
Image: PM Narendra Modi with global leaders at one of the Raisina Dialogue editions.
While diversification helps in broadening the scope and range of research along with encouraging professionalism, one major problem is that such organisations essentially adopt and project Western-oriented paradigms and theoretical models, ignoring the legacy of longue duree history of the region and indigenous scholarship or theories.
Indigenous Indian think tanks need to develop their own models and new paradigms to compete and emerge as major front-runners in global academic competition.
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