Rising INDIA in the changing AsiaPacific: Strategies and Challenges

Rising India in the Changing AsiaPacific: Strategies and Challenges, is an attempt to understand and examine changing geopolitical realities of the AsiaPacific in the twentyfirst century and emerging contours of India’s responses to the newemerging challenges as an emerging great power. This edited volume throws light on two decades of India’s Look East Policy, its efforts towards connectivity, regional cooperation and its overall foreign policy thrusts towards its extended neighbourhood in the East. The volume also puts in perspective India’s approaches to multilateralism and its role in the whole gamut of ASEANdriven regional architectures – ASEAN, ASEAN Regional forum, East Asia Summit, ASEAN Plus Defence Ministerial Meeting (ADMM+), BIMSTEC, Mekong Ganga Cooperation etc.

The study suggests that India has focused its attention on strategic engagement with AsiaPacific by expanding its commitments and participation in the multilateral cooperative framework to counter both traditional and nontraditional threats facing the region. While Chinathreat seems to have been giving fresh lease of life to India’s balancing roles at regular intervals, challenges life maritime security, seapiracy, terrorism, climate change, food security, natural disasters, and financial security continue to bring India and the AsiaPacific together. The region exhibits a new buoyancy towards greater economic integration, physical and cultural connectivity and sustained engagement at the levels of governments, private business and peopletopeople. Although challenges, such as bureaucratic loopholes, pressure groups and the lack of political will, inhibit the full scale relationship, civic drivers of engagement are giving new momentum to the strategic engagement between in rising India and a very powerful AsiaPacific in what has come to be known as ‘Asian Century’.