As India prepares to take its place in shaping the course of an ‘Asian century’, there are increasing debates about its ‘grand strategy’ and its role in a future world order. This timely and topical book presents a range of historical and contemporary interpretations and case studies on the theme. Drawing upon rich and diverse narratives that have informed India’s strategic discourse, security and foreign policy, it charts a new agenda for strategic thinking on postcolonial India from a non-Western perspective. Comprehensive and insightful, the work will prove indispensable to those in defence and strategic studies, foreign policy, political science, and modern Indian history. It will also interest policy-makers, think-tanks and diplomats.

The book explores the competing grand strategic worldviews shaping India’s foreign and security policies by analyzing the interaction between normative modern international relations theories and vernacular concepts of statecraft and strategy. To assess the diverse competing ideas which characterize India’s debates on grand strategy and foreign policy, the author presents the subculture-cleavage model of grand strategic thought. This innovative analytical framework reveals the complexities of India’s strategic pluralism and offers the building blocks for a systematic analysis of grand strategy formation. The book demonstrates that the strategic paradigms, or strategic subcultures, are marked by contending ideas of Indian statehood and civilization, held by policymakers and the informed public, and are a result of ideology-driven perceptions of the country’s strategic environment. The author argues that the apparent hybridization and stretching of modern and traditional concepts of international relations in India has become a widespread feature of Indian foreign policy to meet the needs of state formation and nation-building. A unique approach to organizing and understanding the debates and discourse in Indian strategic thinking, the book will be of interest to specialists and students in the field of International Relations, political theory, South Asian Studies, and India’s foreign and security policy.

Based upon work supported by the Department of Energy (National Nuclear Security Administration) under Award Number DE-FG52-03SF22724.

The book provides an analytic framework for grand strategy and applies the framework to illuminate the grand strategies of the Great Powers of the twenty-first century: India, China, Russia, and the United States. The book also uses Coca-Cola as a case study to illustrate the potential influence of grand strategy on business strategy. The analysis is rigorous, logical, fact-based, historically rooted, and well-sourced with abundant endnotes to encourage further exploration by readers.

The essential introduction to the comparative analysis of national grand strategies.

This book provides a state-of-the-art analysis of India’s foreign and security policies, examining e.g. the country’s security, economic and trade ties and interactions with Pakistan, China, the United States, Japan, the Middle East and ASEAN. Furthermore, the contributors provide the reader with an overview and analysis of the quality and challenges of India’s regional and global trade and investment policies. While in the past India has been a reluctant and not particularly prominent foreign and security policy actor in East and Southeast Asia as well as globally, China’s resurgence and its assertive and increasingly aggressive regional security policies have led India’s policymakers to reconsider the country’s decades-old non-alignment policies and opt for expanding security and defence ties with the United States, Japan and others. The Indian-Chinese border clashes in 2020 and China’s unlawful occupation of disputed territories along the Indian-Chinese border in the Himalayas have convinced Delhi’s policymakers and the country’s security and defence elites that India is well advised to join and contribute to US-led China containment policies. The expansion of India’s security and defence ties with Japan over recent years in particular will continue to be instrumental to keeping Beijing’s territorial expansionism in Southeast and South Asia in check. This volume analyses India’s involvement and engagement in regional and global trade and investment structures and flows in great detail. Written by a team of prolific European and Indian scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of international relations and security studies, as well as policymakers at governmental or international organizations.

In The Unfinished Quest, leading international relations and South Asia scholar T.V. Paul charts India's cumbersome path toward higher regional and global status, covering both the successes and failures it has experienced since the modern nation's founding in 1947. Paul focuses on the key motivations driving Indian leaders to enhance India's global status and power, but also on the many constraints that have hindered its progress. Paul's analysis of India's quest for status also sheds important light on the current geostrategic situation and serves as a new framework for understanding the China-India rivalry, as well as India's relative position in the broader Indo-Pacific theater.

This book explores what military strategy is and how it is interconnected with policy on one hand and military operations on the other. In the process, it traces the transformation of the notion of strategy from its original military moorings to a more policy-oriented and-influenced conception and elaborates upon a tripartite framework of policy, strategy and doctrine to think about, understand, and analyse the use of force. The book explores the politics of India-Pakistan conflict in order to root the study of Indian military strategy in the political sphere. It discusses three main issues that have ensured the persistence of conflict: incompatible national identities, Pakistan's congenital quest for parity with and compulsion to challenge India, and irreconcilable positions on the Kashmir issue. The book argues that India has invariably pursued limited political aims that did not threaten Pakistan's survival or form of government or regime in power albeit containing a counter offensive elements. It states that India employed the strategy of exhaustion during the Indian Army's campaigns in the 1947-48 conflict and 1965 war, which made way to strategy of annihilation during the 1971 war (East Pakistan), but after Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons capability the strategy is back to exhaustion. The book highlights the importance of designing an overall military strategy for waging limited war and pursuing carefully calibrated political and military objectives by creatively combining the individual doctrines of the three services by establishing a Chief of Defence Staff system.

A comprehensive and revealing account of the ongoing struggles and instability of India s political and economic institutions India s ascent as a formidable power on the world stage and its geopolitical ramifications have received much attention in recent years. This comprehensive study by Sumit Ganguly and William Thompson, two highly distinguished scholars of political science and international relations, delves into the intricate inner workings of this great Asian nation to reveal an Indian state struggling to maintain national security, domestic order, and steady fiscal growth despite weaknesses in its economic and political institutions. The authors sobering account questions India s perceived strengths and domestic and foreign policy initiatives, while focusing on the South Asian giant s infrastructural and economic growth problems, opposition to reform, and other important hurdles the nation has faced and will continue to face over the coming decade and beyond.