The political slogan "Make America Great Again" (MAGA), prominently associated with the presidency of Donald Trump, signified a broader shift toward economic nationalism, protectionism, and reduced multilateral engagement in United States policy between 2017 and 2021. While primarily domestic in its ideological orientation, these policy shifts reverberated across global knowledge infrastructures, including academic publishing markets, international research collaboration, and digital information ecosystems. India, as an emerging knowledge economy with rapidly expanding higher education institutions, remains structurally intertwined with U.S.-based scholarly databases, publishing conglomerates, and academic mobility networks. This paper critically examines the indirect yet meaningful effects of MAGA-era policies on the Indian library system. It analyzes impacts across four major domains: academic publishing economics, subscription and consortial models, research mobility and collaboration, and the acceleration of open access and digital self-reliance initiatives. Drawing upon scholarship on global higher education, publishing oligopolies, and open access movements, the study argues that although MAGA-related protectionist trends introduced short-term financial and structural pressures, they simultaneously catalyzed institutional resilience and reform within India's library ecosystem. The article concludes that global political nationalism can reshape transnational knowledge systems, but also stimulate adaptive transformations in developing information infrastructures.
Krishnendu Pramanik (Mon,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: