The politics of gifts and reciprocity in South–South Cooperation: The case of India's Covid‐19 diplomacy

Abstract

Development economists have often argued that South–South flows of capital and aid are devoid of the conditionalities and hierarchies that define North–South flows of the same. Maussians and neo‐Maussians maintain that gifting—which allows for the ethos of reciprocity—leads to the formation of more equal international partnerships. This article focusses on India's development diplomacy. We unpack Indian cultural notions of ‘gifting’, which do not allow for imaginings of reciprocity, and show how ‘the gift’ has been strategically employed by Indian actors as a tool of state‐making to forge relations of hierarchy and dependence globally.