Professional Affiliation

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in 20th Century International History, King's College London

Expert Bio

A specialist of South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Dr. Guyot-Réchard holds a lectureship (assistant professorship) in contemporary international history at King’s College London. Her award-winning work focuses on the long-term impact of decolonization on the world as we know it today, particularly in terms of international politics. She has written extensively on Sino-Indian relations and on the strategic borderlands between India, Burma and Tibet. More recent work focuses on India’s practice of diplomacy and on South Asia and the international order. At the Wilson Center, she will be working on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean since 1945. She regularly intervenes on South Asia-related issues in international media and policy circles.

Wilson Center Project

Governing the Sea: Indian Ocean Geopolitics, 1945-1990

Project Summary

Home to the world’s busiest trade routes and surrounded by emerging powers and arcs of instability, the Indian Ocean is central to the re-balancing of the international order. To understand this reconfiguration and how it might evolve, a comprehensive analysis of Indian Ocean geopolitics in the second half of the 20th century is necessary. This project demonstrates that these were intimately connected not just to the Cold War, but to the state-building efforts of post-colonial countries along its rim and the sea’s emergence as a sovereignty and governance frontier—with legacies that continue to shape present-day geopolitics.

Major Publications

"The Indian Ocean after 1945”.  In Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives, ed. Prasannan Parthasarathi. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, 2020.

Tangled Lands: Burma and India's Unfinished Separation, 1937–1948. The Journal of Asian Studies, 1-23, 2020.

The fear of being compared: State-shadowing in the Himalayas, 1910 62, Political Geography, 2019.

Coping with defeat. Posters of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Invisible Histories, 2018.

'Tour diaries and itinerant governance in the eastern Himalayas, ca.1909-1962', The Historical Journal (60:4), 1023-1046, 2017.

Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

“When legions thunder past: The Second World War and India’s north-east frontier”, in War in History 25:3 (2018), 328-60

"Nation-building or state-making? India's North-East Frontier and the ambiguities of Nehruvian developmentalism, 1950–1959” in Contemporary South Asia, 21:1 (2013), 22-37.