India and China: National Imagebuilding in Southeast Asia

The book makes a major contribution to the academic literature on diplomacy, foreign policy & soft power by studying the Indian and Chinese imagebuilding processes in Southeast Asia — an increasingly significant region for both the Asian players — and the accompanyingdiscourse. The volume focuses on various geopolitical and economic compulsions driving India and China’s imagebuilding efforts and examines the nuances and characteristics defining their engagement of the region based on primary sources and extensive field study. Leaderships of both countries have been pragmatic in extending the scope of engagement, exploring new ways and means for strengthening the regional relationship and efforts to develop together. Regionalisation, as the book  argues, has been deployed by both India and China among their strategies for a positive image makeover. The existing academic literature on both India andChina’s imagebuilding efforts are relatively scant and are yet to be rigorously researched. The book makes an important contribution to the existing literature through its examination of various facets of India andChina’s external engagement and diplomacy for building respective images in Southeast Asia.