You're listening to American Prestige.

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Find the link in our show notes. Hello, Hello, Prestige heads and welcome.

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome back to the podcast today. My old friend Lydia Walker, Lydia is presently the assistant professor and assistant professor admires chair in global military history at the Ohio State University. And she's also the author of States in Waiting,

A Counter-Narrative of Global Decolonization.

Lydia, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks a lot, Danny and Derek, for having me.

No problem. The pleasure is all ours.

Why don't we start with a basic question, which is two things.

One, what made you want to write this book? What in the field

was exciting about it to you? And then kind of from there, its subtitle is a counter-narrative

of global decolonization. So I think a good first question is, what narrative is it countering?

And what is your story adding to the history of global decolonization

that we didn't already know? So after undergraduate, I worked at a think tank in New Delhi.

And I did that because I wanted to understand some things about how the world worked and booked from a very different perspective.

And while I was there, I realized that India is full of what me might call autonomous movements, what I call states in waiting, anti-state,

ethno-nationalist linguistic movements within.

That it's almost better to think of India as like a continent like Europe than a sort of unitary country in some

ways. And as I was sort of getting this sort of on the ground education of Indian domestic

and security politics because I was at a think tank,

the Institute of Peace and Conference Studies,

...