India’s Grand Strategy and Foreign Policy: Strategic Pluralism and Subcultures

✍ Scribed by Bernhard Beitelmair-Berini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 213
• Series: Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1 How to delineate India’s strategic pluralism?
Chapter 2 Strategic culture as an IR concept
Chapter 3 India’s strategic culture debate
Chapter 4 Cleavage theory and international relations
Chapter 5 India’s grand strategic cleavages
Chapter 6 A case study: India’s Israel policy
Chapter 7 The subculture-cleavage model: A heuristic tool to grasp strategic pluralism?
Bibliography
Index