The research team, led by Alolika Mangal with Vishwambhar Prasad Sati and Surajit Banerjee, conducted fieldwork between January and June 2025 across eighteen restaurants selected on the basis of popularity, ownership by community members, and location within or near settlement pockets. The method combined participant observation with unstructured interviews lasting roughly twenty to thirty minutes each, held with restaurant owners and forty regular customers inside the establishments. Separately, sixty Bengali respondents who frequently consume these cuisines were recruited through snowball sampling and interviewed about their preferences and perceptions. Interviews were audio- and video-recorded with consent, transcribed verbatim, and analysed through manual thematic coding, while the survey responses were organised into a food preference matrix using the Python libraries NumPy and Pandas for data cleaning and descriptive statistics. Respondents could select more than one preferred cuisine, so cumulative frequencies exceeded the sample size, and the resulting matrix was visualised as a heatmap in which colour intensity represented the number of respondents in each age group choosing each cuisine.

The Afghan story is the oldest and perhaps the most deeply woven into Bengali daily cooking. Pashto-speaking Afghan communities have settled in Bengal since the sixteenth century, but the Kolkata Afghans—mainly Kabuliwalas, immortalised in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story—arrived as traders of dry fruits, attar perfumes and hing, the pungent asafetida native to the Afghan mountains. When closed borders prevented their return, they settled around Madan Street, Chandni Chowk and Bentinck Street, and their goods entered middle-class Bengali kitchens. The study documents how hing transformed a classic Bengali preparation, the deep-fried kachuri, into the now-iconic hing er kachuri, while Afghan kebabs were reimagined as fillings wrapped in fried parathas with raw onions, echoing the city’s Mughlai rolls. More than five thousand Afghan families are estimated to live in Kolkata today, many of them second- or third-generation migrants for whom the city is home.

Field visits to eateries such as Islamia Darbar near the Nakhoda Masjid, Kabul Kolkata Restaurant in Park Circus, and Kachhi 1847 revealed a cuisine that thrives on authenticity rather than glamour. Islamia Darbar serves keema, kaliya, kaleji, kebab and nihari in a setting the researchers describe as reminiscent of a Kabul market, drawing mainly traders and business owners. At Kachhi 1847, the owner explained that the Peshawari chicken chapli kebab, the Sunday-only kacchi biryani made to order, and the Lab-e-Shireen dessert are in constant demand, ordered even for celebrations. Yet the study also notes a precarious side: many Afghan food joints struggle to survive, and the rustic spaces that remain function as cultural enclaves where sitting style, menu and clientele preserve a community identity that few literary works have recorded.

The Parsi presence presents a starker contrast between historical depth and present vulnerability. Parsi merchants arrived in the late eighteenth century as Kolkata became the political and economic centre of British Bengal, and the community has maintained one of the longest documented continuous presences of any trading group in the city. Their cuisine, however, was guarded—recipes rarely shared beyond the community—and adapted ingeniously to local ingredients. The study traces how the Persian khoresh, a slow-cooked meat dish with herbs, dried fruits and mild spices such as turmeric and saffron, became the Indian dhansak when merchants unfamiliar with lentils began adding three to nine types of pulses, spinach and hot Indian spices to stretch expensive mutton, transforming a mild sweet-and-sour stew into a fiery curry. Patrani macchi, steamed fish wrapped in banana leaves, mirrors the Bengali maccher paturi so closely that the two dishes are often confused.

Today that two-century-old migratory cuisine is in a critical state. The Parsi population of Kolkata is shrinking as younger generations migrate, the community ages, and economic growth slows, which means fewer cooks, lower demand and shrinking visibility. Small establishments such as Mancherji’s in Taltala, open six days a week and sustained by loyal regulars, survive partly on customised orders from Parsi households and Bengali wedding ceremonies. The owner, Supriya Mancherji, told the researchers that the trust of regular customers is what keeps the place running in a competitive market. Even community institutions like the Kolkata Parsi Club and the Kolkata Zoroastrian Community’s Religious and Charity Fund are struggling to preserve a culture that once shaped the city’s heritage buildings and religious sites. The 113-year-old Manackjee Rustomjee Parsi Dharamsala on Bow Street remains a rare gathering point, its open dining hall still serving home-cooked Parsi meals to travellers and food lovers alike.

The Tibetan culinary story began with displacement. When the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, thousands followed him into Indian exile, and government-designated settlements were established across the country, including in Darjeeling, where the Tibetan Refugee Self-Help Centre provided livelihood support. Seasonal traders of woollen garments, handicrafts and agricultural products travelled down historic trade routes through the duars—gateway passes active during the nineteenth century—to Kolkata, forming a settlement around Wellington Square in the city’s centre. The elderly migrant couple known as the Sundans are credited with introducing Tibetan food to the city, leading to the founding of Hamro Momo in 1985 and later institutions such as Tibetan Delight, Momo Plaza and Orchid. The researchers observed queues of college students outside Tibetan Delight, located near schools, medical colleges and cultural landmarks like Nandan and the Victoria Memorial Hall, with one young customer explaining that he had heard of the place from an uncle who once studied nearby.

Adaptation has been the key to Tibetan food’s success. The mild, yak-meat-filled momos of the Himalayas became chicken, onion and garlic versions for Bengali palates; inspired by traditional Bengali fried chops, vendors developed crispy fried and pan-fried kothey styles; and a recent variant infuses the momo with gondhoraj lemon, a fragrance deeply associated with Bengali vegetarian cooking. Thukpa, the hearty noodle soup, completed the trio of dishes that now dominate the city’s street-food landscape, appearing at weddings, rainy-day tables and roadside stalls alike. At the same time, fine-dining venues such as Yeti-The Himalayan Kitchen on Park Street and Denzong Kitchen in Lake Town have packaged Tibetan food within a Zen-inspired aesthetic for affluent diners seeking a Himalayan experience, demonstrating how a single cuisine can occupy both the cheapest and the most expensive ends of the urban food market.

Korean food arrived by an entirely different route: not through migration or trade, but through screens. The Hallyu, or Korean Wave, spread across East and Southeast Asia in the 1990s and then globally through digital platforms, amplified by the Korean government’s strategic cultural export plans and by phenomena such as Squid Game, Parasite, BTS and Blackpink. In Kolkata, the wave reached its peak during the COVID-19 pandemic, when locked-down young people turned to online entertainment and emerged with an appetite for bibimbap, Korean fried chicken and kimbap rice rolls. The study’s preference matrix quantifies this generational divide sharply: Korean cuisine drew sixteen respondents aged 18 to 25 and twelve aged 26 to 35, while Afghan cuisine peaked among those over sixty, with eleven respondents, many of whom associate it with nostalgia and the city’s Mughlai heritage. Young interviewees told the researchers that they loved Korean pop culture and therefore Korean food, and that many were unaware of the Afghan and Parsi establishments that had shaped Bengali tables for generations.

The researchers frame this as gastrodiplomacy in action—soft power, in the sense coined by Joseph Nye, translating cultural diplomacy from the state to the public through cuisine. Korean cafes such as Mise En Place, the BTS Army café and Seoul Café now compete directly with the city’s beloved Chinese and Mughlai food, propelled by social media marketing and the purchasing power of an affluent urban middle class. The contrast with the older communities is instructive: Tibetan food remains accessible across socioeconomic groups at street prices, Afghan food sits in an affordable mid-range of roughly 400 to 800 rupees for two, Korean food commands 1000 to 1500 rupees as a marker of global connection, and Parsi food, at 1500 to 1800 rupees with limited commercial presence, is confined largely to devoted patrons and elite enthusiasts. The study concludes that the visibility and survival of culinary traditions depend not only on taste but on economic accessibility, media influence, demographic strength and cultural power. As Parsi cuisine teeters on the edge of disappearance and Korean food surges on digital momentum, Kolkata’s rolling platter continues to prove that a city’s identity is negotiated one meal at a time.

Subject of Research: The influence of Afghan, Parsi, Tibetan and Korean communities on Kolkata's food culture and urban foodscape

Article Title: Underrepresented food culture and culinary journey of selected foreign communities of Kolkata

Article References: Mangal, A., Sati, V. P., & Banerjee, S. (2026). Underrepresented food culture and culinary journey of selected foreign communities of Kolkata. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00595-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00595-0

Keywords: Kolkata, food culture, Afghan cuisine, Parsi cuisine, Tibetan cuisine, Korean Wave, Hallyu, foodscape, migration, culinary heritage, soft power, street food

The editorial traces an unexpected political trajectory. Unlike right-wing populist politicians in Europe, Trump was not clearly identified by party or political inclination until 2015, the year he announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. For much of his career he worked as a marketeer, stamping his name on hotels, condominiums, wine, neckties, steaks, and even what the authors describe as a bogus university. The American political establishment did not take him seriously. Yet a significant element within the evolving core of the Republican Party did. Rockman and his colleagues describe how Trump found a way to channel resentment against prevailing elites, and how a central pillar of his pitch was the claim that America was being taken advantage of by its purported allies and by the rest of the world. That framing, the authors note, was not the whole of his appeal, but it was an essential structural component of it.

The intellectual core of the Trump approach to world affairs is captured in the slogan America First, a phrase previously associated with pre-World War II American isolationists. Some observers, the editorial notes, have defined America First as America Alone. In the authors’ analysis the doctrine has two operational components. The first is transactionalism: American international policy should be based on self-interested advantages in international dealings rather than on ideological differences. The second concerns the instruments of statecraft. Soft power, the capacity to attract and persuade through culture, values, and institutional credibility, should be eliminated, while hard power should be enhanced. This inversion matters technically because soft power is a slow-building asset embedded in alliances, treaties, and reputational capital, whereas hard power is deployed directly. A strategy that liquidates the former to expand the latter changes the cost structure of every future negotiation the United States enters.

The first Trump administration provided a proof of concept. The editorial records that many steps were taken to undo prior international commitments, including the Paris accords on global climate change and the six-power agreement with Iran designed to stem the potential development of nuclear weapons. Both withdrawals illustrate the transactional logic in practice. The Paris agreement rested on diffuse, long-horizon collective action, a structure that yields no immediate bilateral leverage and therefore carries little value under a purely transactional calculus. The Iran accord, by contrast, was a negotiated constraint exchange, verifiable in its terms but revocable by any successor government, which made it vulnerable to a doctrine that weighted immediate advantage over institutional continuity. Climate cooperation and nonproliferation are both classic transboundary common goods, and the editorial frames their erosion as precisely the kind of damage that motivates the Special Issue.

Guardrails, however, were present during the first term. The authors attribute this partly to what they describe as the president’s limited attention span, which worked in some measure to soften the actual policy product. This observation has analytical significance for students of governance. Policy outcomes in presidential systems depend not only on the preferences of the chief executive but on the friction of implementation: career civil servants, legal review, allied pushback, and the sheer bandwidth required to convert intentions into regulations and diplomatic actions. In the first administration, that friction absorbed much of the radical energy. Institutions acted as dampers, and the deviations from international norms, though real, were buffered by the residual authority of the foreign policy establishment.

The second presidency removed those dampers. The editorial states that by the time Trump reappeared as president after losing the 2020 election, preparations for an even more radical departure from international norms were in place, no longer to be disturbed by the existing foreign policy establishment. In a striking formulation, the authors invoke reverse biblical parlance to describe the transformation of American foreign policy power as the capacity to turn alms into arms. The image conveys a substitution of coercion for inducement. Where the traditional postwar toolkit relied on aid, membership benefits, and shared institutions to align other states’ incentives, the renovated toolkit substitutes direct pressure. The technical consequence is a shift from repeated-game cooperation, in which states invest in reputation across many interactions, to one-shot bargaining in which every relationship is priced independently.

The contributions gathered in the Special Issue analyze how these radical plans have come to some measure of fruition and what they have done to the global system. According to the editorial, the articles examine effects on regional alliances, on the production of common goods across national borders, and on the dilution, if not full elimination, of soft power resources. The concept of common goods is central to the analysis. Public goods such as climate stability, pandemic preparedness, and open trade routes suffer from underprovision when the largest contributor withdraws, because no single smaller state can substitute for its scale. When the hegemonic guarantor of an order converts its contributions into bilateral transactions, the collective-good equilibrium of the entire system shifts, and regional powers must decide whether to backfill the gap, hedge, or pursue autonomous provision.

The editorial also directs attention to the demand side of the Trump phenomenon, exploring why it has been successful in gaining power in the United States. The authors connect that domestic success to the international consequences: the same anti-elite, anti-establishment resentment that propelled the candidacy supplies the political energy for dismantling the institutional commitments that elites built. This coupling means that the durability of the transactional turn cannot be assessed by studying diplomacy alone. It requires understanding the constituent coalition within the Republican Party that took Trump seriously when the establishment did not, and the conditions under which that coalition continues to reward the abandonment of multilateral commitments. The Special Issue’s contributors treat this domestic-international linkage as a single analytic problem rather than two separate fields.

The final strand of the editorial concerns reconstruction. The authors write that the contributions consider how global policy and institutions must now be conceived and remade in the aftermath of the Trump disruptions. That question has a technical dimension. Institutions designed in the mid-twentieth century assumed a stable American commitment anchored in ideological alignment and reputational investment. If transactionalism persists across administrations, then effective redesign may require mechanisms that do not depend on the goodwill of a single hegemon: distributed financing, automatic compliance incentives, and coalition structures in which middle powers carry larger shares of provision. The editorial, published as an open-access framing piece in Global Public Policy and Governance in December 2025, positions the Special Issue as an early empirical accounting of what breaks when the rules-based order is run on a strictly self-interested ledger, and as a starting point for thinking about which parts of global governance can be rebuilt to withstand it.

Subject of Research: The impact of the America First doctrine and two Trump presidencies on global governance and the international order

Article Title: Trump and globalism

Article References: Rockman, B., Jing, Y., Pegram, T., & Traniello, C. (2025). Trump and globalism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 303-304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Keywords: Donald Trump, globalism, global governance, America First, foreign policy, soft power, hard power, international order, transactionalism, Paris accords, Iran nuclear deal, common goods

The concept of soft power, famously theorized by Joseph Nye, describes a state’s ability to achieve preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment. Tiwary and Gunasekaran apply this framework to a domain that has received comparatively little systematic attention in international relations scholarship: the restoration, conservation, and celebration of Hindu and Buddhist temple sites across Southeast Asia. Their study traces how India’s historical ties with the region, rooted in shared religious traditions and sustained cultural exchange dating back more than a millennium, form the foundation for contemporary diplomatic initiatives. From the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms that flourished in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand to the circulation of the Ramayana epic across the region, the authors contend that this deep civilizational substrate gives India a distinctive form of cultural capital that few other powers can credibly claim.

The methodological core of the study is a qualitative analysis of key examples of temple restoration projects, cultural exchanges, and educational collaborations. India’s involvement in the conservation of the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia stands as the most prominent case in this tradition, alongside restoration work at other heritage sites across the region. Such projects, the authors argue, operate on multiple levels simultaneously. At the material level, they transfer technical expertise in archaeology, epigraphy, and conservation science. At the symbolic level, they signal respect for the host nation’s heritage and frame India as a custodian of a shared civilizational legacy rather than a foreign power pursuing narrow strategic interests. The researchers highlight how these initiatives promote mutual understanding and cooperation, generating goodwill that conventional diplomatic instruments often struggle to achieve.

The study situates temple diplomacy within India’s broader foreign policy evolution, from the Look East policy of the 1990s to the more assertive Act East framework of recent decades. Under the current administration, soft power instruments including Buddhism, the diaspora, and yoga have been consciously elevated in Indian diplomacy, and temple diplomacy extends this repertoire into the architectural and ritual domain. The authors note that cultural dimensions have become increasingly central to India’s engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, complementing trade agreements, connectivity projects, and security dialogues. In their assessment, temple diplomacy strengthens India’s soft power while contributing to the broader goals of regional stability and cultural connectivity across Southeast Asia.

What makes the study particularly timely is the competitive context in which it is written. The authors devote significant attention to the challenges India faces, including cultural misunderstandings and competition from other regional powers. China has invested heavily in heritage diplomacy of its own, from the Sinocentric historicisation of transnational World Heritage Sites in Central Asia to Buddhist cultural diplomacy linking Chinese and Thai temples. Japan has long deployed pop-culture diplomacy, South Korea has pursued cultural engagement through its New Southern Policy, and infrastructural competition between India and China plays out across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Against this crowded field of cultural statecraft, the study suggests that India’s advantage lies in authenticity: the temple traditions of Southeast Asia are genuinely intertwined with those of the subcontinent, making Indian engagement in this sphere difficult for rivals to replicate.

The research also engages with the relational dimension of soft power, emphasizing that temple diplomacy works through people-to-people bonds rather than top-down messaging. Educational collaborations, cultural festivals, dance traditions such as those celebrated at Konark in Odisha, and the shared narrative repertoire of the Ramayana all create channels of contact between Indian and Southeast Asian publics. The authors argue that these channels matter because attraction, unlike military capability, cannot simply be decreed by governments; it must be cultivated through sustained, credible interaction. Sacred sites, in this reading, function as what might be called diplomatic infrastructure: physical spaces that anchor recurring pilgrimages, scholarly exchanges, and ceremonial events that keep bilateral relationships warm even when high-level politics cool.

The study does not present temple diplomacy as a panacea. Cultural misunderstandings remain a real risk, since the religious symbolism that resonates with one audience may be misread or contested by another. Southeast Asian nations guard their foreign policy autonomy carefully and are wary of any initiative that appears to assert Indian cultural primacy over their own distinctive traditions. The authors are candid that the effectiveness of these initiatives varies, and that temple diplomacy must be pursued with sensitivity to local ownership of heritage. A restoration project perceived as generous conservation partnership builds goodwill; one perceived as cultural appropriation could damage it. This tension between civilizational narrative and national sovereignty is, in the authors’ view, the central management problem of temple diplomacy.

The geopolitical stakes are considerable. The study situates its analysis within the broader literature on India’s China strategy, minilateral and multilateral soft balancing in the Indo-Pacific, and the evolving geopolitics of India-ASEAN engagement. In this framing, temple diplomacy is not a substitute for hard power but a complement to it, part of a portfolio of instruments through which India constrains the influence of competitors without direct confrontation. The authors draw on recent scholarship describing how geopolitical codes are constructed through both material projects and discursive claims, and temple diplomacy operates precisely at this intersection: it is a material intervention in physical heritage sites that simultaneously makes a discursive claim about who belongs to which civilizational community. The finding that such cultural strategies contribute to regional stability suggests that soft power instruments may play a stabilizing role even amid intensifying great power rivalry.

For the field of international relations, the study contributes to a growing body of work on cultural approaches to diplomacy, joining analyses of gastronomic diplomacy, sport mega-events, film co-productions, and textile heritage as instruments of national branding. Its distinctive contribution is to demonstrate that religious architecture, often treated by political scientists as a static backdrop to politics, can be analyzed as an active variable in diplomatic strategy. The authors conclude that temple diplomacy not only strengthens India’s soft power but also positions India as a pivotal player in the evolving geopolitical landscape of Southeast Asia. As competition for influence in the Indo-Pacific intensifies, the study suggests that the contest may be decided not only in naval deployments and trade negotiations but also in the quiet, patient work of restoring sacred stones that two civilizations have shared for over a thousand years.

Subject of Research: Temple diplomacy as a soft power strategy in India's relations with Southeast Asian nations

Article Title: Temple diplomacy: India’s cultural strategy for enhancing soft power in southeast Asia

Article References: Temple diplomacy: India’s cultural strategy for enhancing soft power in southeast Asia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01753-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01753-6

Keywords: temple diplomacy, soft power, India, Southeast Asia, cultural diplomacy, religious heritage, Angkor Wat, Act East policy, India-ASEAN relations, Hinduism, Buddhism, geopolitics