Publications

Sagar, Rahul. The Birth of Liberalism: Mama Parmanand’s Letters to An Indian Raja. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026.

Sagar, Rahul. Krishna Kumari: The Tragedy of India. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.

Sagar, Rahul. The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Sagar, Rahul. To Raise A Fallen People: The Nineteenth Century Origins of India’s View of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

Sagar, Rahul. Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Sagar, Rahul and Sabl, Andrew. Realism in Political Theory. Routledge, (2018).

Jayakumar, S., and Rahul Sagar, (Eds.).  The Big Ideas of Lee Kuan Yew. Straits Times Press Press Pte Limited (2015).

Sabl, Andrew  and Rahul Sagar,  "Introduction," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy Vol. 20 , Iss. 3 (2017).

Sagar, Rahul. "Are charter cities legitimate?." Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2016.

Sagar, Rahul. "Against Moral Absolutism: Surveillance and Disclosure After Snowden." Ethics & International Affairs 29, no. 2 (2015): 145-159.

Sagar, Rahul. "Creaky Leviathan: A Comment on David Pozen's Leaky Leviathan." Harvard Law Review Forum 512 (2013).

Sagar, Rahul. "Is ideal theory practical?." Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (2011): 1949-1965.

Sagar, Rahul. "Presaging the Moderns: Demosthenes’ Critique of Popular Government." The Journal of Politics 71, no. 4 (2009): 1394-1405.

Sagar, Rahul. "Who holds the balance? A missing detail in the debate over balancing security and liberty." Polity 41, no. 2 (2009): 166-188.

Sagar, Rahul. "On combating the abuse of state secrecy." Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 4 (2007): 404-427.

Sagar, Rahul., and Mukherjee, R. "Pragmatism in Indian Strategic Thought." India Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2018

Sagar, Rahul, and Ankit Panda. "Pledges and Pious Wishes: The Constituent Assembly Debates and the Myth of a “Nehruvian Consensus”." India Review 14, no. 2 (2015): 203-220.

Sagar, Rahul. "State of mind: what kind of power will India become?." International Affairs 85, no. 4 (2009): 801-816.

Sagar, Rahul. "What's in a name? India and America in the twenty-first century." Survival 46, no. 3 (2004): 115-135.

Sagar, Rahul. “The Empire Wrote Back: Ideas in Nineteenth Century India.” In Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Richard Boyd, Aurelian Craiutu, Christine Dunn Henderson, and Jeremy R. Jennings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2026 (forthcoming).

Sagar, Rahul. “Singapore as an Icon.” In Singapore 2004–2024: Transformation of a Nation, edited by Shashi Jayakumar. Singapore: World Scientific, 2025 (forthcoming).

Sagar, Rahul. Democracy’s Limit: A Realist Response to the Quest for Transparency In Matt Sleat, ed., Politics Recovered: Essays on Realist Political Thought, New York: Columbia University Press (2016).

Sagar, Rahul,  Executive Privilege and State Secrecy in David Coates, ed., Oxford Companion to American Politics, New York: Oxford University Press (2012).

Sagar, Rahul. “Leading Ideas.” In Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, edited by Ashley J. Tellis, C. Raja Mohan, and Bibek Debroy. New York: Penguin, 2023.

Sagar, Rahul. Hindu Nationalism and the Cold War in Manu Bhagavan, ed., India and the Cold War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019

Sagar, Rahul, Emergency Provisions in Sujit Choudhry, Pratap Mehta, and Madhav Khosla, eds., Oxford Handbook on the Indian Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2015).

Sagar, Rahul.  Before Midnight: Views on International Relations, 1857-1947 in David Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan, eds., Oxford Handbook on Indian Foreign Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Sagar, Rahul,  The Hindu Nationalist View of International Politics in Kanti Bajpai, ed., India's Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases, New Delhi: Routledge, 2014.

Sagar, Rahul. "The Price We Pay for a Free Encyclopedia." Hindustan Times, April 3, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "Why Campuses Must Be Kept Free of Party Politics." Hindustan Times, March 20, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "Must Lutyens Fall So That Bharat Can Rise Again." Hindustan Times, March 6, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "What Japan Has Meant to India, Through a Lens of History." Hindustan Times, February 20, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "Xi’s ‘Rejuvenating China’ Vision Hits Demographic Wall." Hindustan Times, February 6, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "The National Anthem Before Our National Anthem Was Adopted." Hindustan Times, January 23, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "Reserving the Right to Counter Foreign Media Narratives." Hindustan Times, January 9, 2026

Sagar, Rahul. "Higher Education in India: Why Making Our Universities Great Again Won’t Be Easy." Hindustan Times, December 26, 2025.

Sagar, Rahul. "India’s History, Preserved in the Distant Archives of the UK." Hindustan Times, December 12, 2025

Sagar, Rahul. "For Democracy, X Marks the Spot. But Only for Now." Hindustan Times, November 28, 2025

Sagar, Rahul. "Trump’s Triumph and the Revival of America’s Creed." Hindustan Times, November 15, 2024

Sagar, Rahul. "What a False Quote about Bengal Reveals about Our Past." Hindustan Times, September 22, 2024

Sagar, Rahul. "The Custodial Death of Indian History." Hindustan Times, March 12, 2023

Sagar, Rahul. "How Machiavelli Came to Baroda, and Inspired an Indian Prince." The Times of India, September 25, 2022.

Sagar, Rahul. "A New Book Restores Maharaja Sir Madhava Rao’s Treatise on Statecraft, the First One in Modern India." Scroll, September 22, 2022

Sagar, Raul. "How, and why, the first Constitution in modern India was written, 75 years before the one we follow", Scroll.in, January 19, 2020

Sagar, Rahul, "Discovering India’s intellectual past", Hindustan Times, December 02, 2019

Sagar, Rahul. "Rediscovering Indian thought: How a scholar built a database of pre-Independence magazines", Scroll.in, November 24, 2019