The Brexit-Belt and Road Axis: India for Neighbourhood First China's Belt & Road Initiative (B&RI), also known as One-Belt-One-Road (OBOR), depends for its success on a tacit alliance with Britain and the financial acumen of the City of London. The London-Beijing axis has likely gathered momentum with Britain's decision to quit the European Union (EU) in June 2016 and Prime Minister Theresa May's triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in March 2017, to begin the divorce process. Sandhya Jain | November 2017 | Strategic Analysis
Too Early to Celebrate! The Decline of Somali Piracy off the East Coast of Africa The pirates of Somalia constitute one one of the greatest threats to maritime security in modern time.Their operations started amidst the political instability, economic crisis and state collapse that characterised the fall of the Siad Barre regime in Somalia in 1991. Samuel Oyewole | November 2017 | Strategic Analysis
Muslim Traditionalism and Violence in the Middle East In recent years, especially after the 9/11 attacks on America, Western academics and policy-makers have increasingly viewed Islam as an inherently violent religion and Muslims as terrorists. Mohammed Nuruzzaman | November 2017 | Strategic Analysis
How North Korea was Armed China and to a lesser extent Pakistan have helped North Korea with its nuclear and missile development programmes. Prabha Rao | October 30, 2017 | Issue Brief
South Asian Geopolitics: Has Pakistan Lost its Plot? Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, by C. Christine Fair, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 343, £27.99 Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, by Myra MacDonald, London: Hurst & Co., 2017, pp. 328, £25.00‘ Abhay Kumar Singh | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
High End in the Pacific: Envisioning the Upper Limits of India-US Naval Cooperation in Pacific-Asia The article argues that India and the United States are poised to strengthen their bilateral strategic convergences, not only in the Indian Ocean but also in Pacific-Asia that lies eastwards of the Malacca Straits, and wherein India’s geo-strategic stakes as well as its military-strategic footprint are likely to increase in the coming years. This would progressively enhance the complementarities between their navies in the western Pacific and its contiguous seas, thereby enabling substantive naval cooperation towards ensuring security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific region. Gurpreet S Khurana | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
The Trump Challenge to the JCPOA Trump’s new policy statement on Iran has enveloped the UNSC-approved Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in a shroud of uncertainty that could lead to further instability in conflict-ridden West Asia. S. Samuel C. Rajiv | October 24, 2017 | IDSA Comments
India’s Strategic Connect with the World The various connectivity projects put forward by India show its involvement as an investor in capacity-building efforts in the recipient countries across sectors of their particular needs and choices, not as an overarching and imposing economic power. Sreemati Ganguli | October 23, 2017 | IDSA Comments
A Rock between Hard Places: Afghanistan as an Arena of Regional Insecurity, by Kristian Berg Harpviken and Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh The book, A Rock between Hard Places, is the result of research carried out by K.B. Harpviken and S. Tadjbakhsh, independently and jointly, with encouragement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway. In this book, the authors have examined the events unfolding in Afghanistan from a regional perspective up to 2015, set against the backdrop of the scheduled withdrawal of the United States (US)-led military alliance. Y.M. Bammi | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
Foreign Policy and Sea Power: India’s Maritime Role Flux The core argument this article makes is that India’s maritime worldview and role conceptions have not only been evolving since the 1950s, but they have also been closely interlinked with how policymakers thought about India’s regional identity and the state’s economic capacity to release resources towards sea power. Today, there are three maritime role conceptions that are vying for the apex’s strategic attention, and they are reflective of a deeper role flux in India’s regional identity. Zorawar Daulet Singh | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
