A middle power is a state that is not a superpower or a great power, but still exerts influence and plays a significant role in international relations. These countries often possess certain capabilities, such as strong economies, advanced technologies, and diplomatic influence, that allow them to have a voice in global affairs. Middle powers are typically seen as bridge-builders between larger powers, using their diplomatic skills to mediate conflicts and promote cooperation on international issues.
Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam was a prominent international strategic affairs analyst, journalist and former Indian civil servant. Considered a proponent of Realpolitik, Subrahmanyam was an influential voice in Indian security affairs for a long time. He was most often referred to as the doyen of India's strategic affairs community, and as the premier ideological champion of India's nuclear deterrent. His son S Jaishankar was appointed India's External Affairs Minister in 2019.
Chilamkuri Raja Mohan is an Indian academic, journalist and foreign policy analyst. He is the Director of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Previously, he was the founding Director of Carnegie India. He has also been a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and prior to that, a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Professor of Centre for South, Central, Southeast Asian and Southwest Pacific Studies, School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was the Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. during 2009-10.
The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty is a 1951 collective security agreement initially formed between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. It requires the parties to maintain their "capacity to resist armed attack", consult with each other on security matters in the Pacific and declares that an armed attack on any of the parties "would be dangerous to [each signatories] peace and safety" and that each signatory "would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes". It also provides for a council of the signatories foreign ministers, in which the implementation of the treaty can be discussed.
Thazha Varkey Paul is an Indo-Canadian political scientist. He is a James McGill professor of International Relations in the department of Political Science at McGill University. Paul specializes in International Relations, especially international security, regional security and South Asia. He served as the president of the International Studies Association (ISA) during 2016–2017, and served as the founding director of the McGill University – Université de Montreal Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS).
The 123 Agreement signed between the United States of America and India is known as the U.S.–India Civil Nuclear Agreement or Indo-US nuclear deal. The framework for this agreement was a July 18, 2005, joint statement by then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then U.S. President George W. Bush, under which India agreed to separate its civil and military nuclear facilities and to place all its civil nuclear facilities under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards and, in exchange, the United States agreed to work toward full civil nuclear cooperation with India. This U.S.-India deal took more than three years to come to fruition as it had to go through several complex stages, including amendment of U.S. domestic law, especially the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, a civil-military nuclear Separation Plan in India, an India-IAEA safeguards (inspections) agreement and the grant of an exemption for India by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an export-control cartel that had been formed mainly in response to India's first nuclear test in 1974. In its final shape, the deal places under permanent safeguards those nuclear facilities that India has identified as "civil" and permits broad civil nuclear cooperation, while excluding the transfer of "sensitive" equipment and technologies, including civil enrichment and reprocessing items even under IAEA safeguards. On August 18, 2008, the IAEA Board of Governors approved, and on February 2, 2009, India signed an India-specific safeguards agreement with the IAEA. After India brought this agreement into force, inspections began in a phased manner on the 35 civilian nuclear installations India has identified in its Separation Plan. The deal is seen as a watershed in U.S.-India relations and introduces a new aspect to international nonproliferation efforts. On August 1, 2008, the IAEA approved the safeguards agreement with India, after which the United States approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to grant a waiver to India to commence civilian nuclear trade. The 48-nation NSG granted the waiver to India on September 6, 2008, allowing it to access civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other countries. The implementation of this waiver made India the only known country with nuclear weapons which is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but is still allowed to carry out nuclear commerce with the rest of the world.
India was among the charter members of the United Nations that signed the Declaration by United Nations at Washington, D.C., on 1 January 1942 and also participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. As a founding member of the United Nations, India strongly supports the purposes and principles of the UN and has made significant contributions in implementing the goals of the Charter, and the evolution of the UN's specialised programmes and agencies.
BM Jain is an Indian political scientist and Sinologist, who has developed and popularized psycho-cultural and geopsychological paradigms in the field of international relations (IR) and international security. He has developed the theory of geopsychology in IR as an alternative to mainstream IR theories. He defines it as "a set of perceptions, images, and belief systems, formed of shared history, culture, nationalism, religion, and ethnicity, which shape the mindsets and behavioral patterns of non-state and authoritarian actors and communities inhabiting a specific geographical area." In understanding China's foreign policy behavior, for instance, he has applied the geopsychology theoretical framework that lists core elements of China's geopsychology: Century of humiliation, the Middle Kingdom syndrome, cultural pride, nationalism, strategic culture, and the anti-hegemony discourse.
China–Sri Lanka relations are the bilateral relations between the People's Republic of China and Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. There is a Chinese embassy located in Colombo and a Sri Lankan embassy situated in Beijing. Historical and cultural ties between the two countries extend back hundreds of years.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is a Sri Lankan academic, geopolitics and foreign policy analyst. He is a political columnist and author. He is a visiting professor for geopolitics and global leadership at Northern Kentucky University and a visiting lecturer in International Political Economy for The University of London in Sri Lanka Royal Institute of Colombo and teaches at the International Security at University of Colombo. Abeyagoonasekera has more than a decade of experience in government administration, serving as the head of several government institutions and positions at the board level. His commentaries on International Relations and Geopolitics are published by Observer Research Foundation New Delhi, London School of Economics and South Asia Journal. Abeyagoonasekera writes the monthly column Dateline Colombo for IPCS think tank in New Delhi.
Commodore Chitrapu Uday Bhaskar is a retired military officer who served in the Indian Navy. He is an expert and outspoken critics on security and strategic affairs.
Diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Maldives were established in 1972. China has an embassy in Malé which opened in November 2011, and the Maldives has an embassy in Beijing which opened in 2009. Approximately 70 percent of the Maldives' total debt is attributed to Chinese projects, with an annual payment of US$92 million to China, constituting around 10 percent of the country's entire budget. China has become pervasive in the Maldives, exerting influence over infrastructure, trade, and energy sectors, raising concerns of a new form of Chinese entrapment.
The Pangduo Hydro Power Station is a reservoir and dam on the Lhasa River in Lhünzhub County to the east of Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. The primary purposes are hydroelectric power generation and agricultural irrigation. Work started in 2008. The first turbine came into production in 2013 and the other three turbines in 2014. With annual generation capacity of 599 million kilowatt hours, it has been called the "Tibetan Three Gorges". Nevertheless, the comparison is hyperbole since the dam is only able to impound less than 1/30th that of Three Gorges.(31.9 vs 0.97 million acre-feet).
The Belt and Road Initiative, known in China as the One Belt One Road and sometimes referred to as the New Silk Road, is a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organizations. The BRI is composed of six urban development land corridors linked by road, rail, energy, and digital infrastructure and the Maritime Silk Road linked by the development of ports.
Debt-trap diplomacy is a term to describe an international financial relationship where a creditor country or institution extends debt to a borrowing nation partially, or solely, to increase the lender's political leverage. The creditor country is said to extend excessive credit to a debtor country with the intention of extracting economic or political concessions when the debtor country becomes unable to meet its repayment obligations. The conditions of the loans are often not publicized. The borrowed money commonly pays for contractors and materials sourced from the creditor country.
The History of Indian foreign policy refers to the foreign relations of modern India post-independence, that is the Dominion of India (from 1947 to 1950) and the Republic of India (from 1950 onwards).
Tibet–India relations are said to have begun during the spread of Buddhism to Tibet from India during the 6th century AD. In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India after the failed 1959 Tibetan uprising. Since then, Tibetans-in-exile have been given asylum in India, with the Indian government accommodating them into 45 residential settlements across 10 states in the country, creating the Tibetan diaspora. From around 150,000 Tibetan refugees in 2011, the number fell to 85,000 in 2018, according to government data. Many Tibetans are now leaving India to go back to Tibet and other countries such as United States or Germany. The Government of India, soon after India's independence in 1947, treated Tibet as a de facto independent country. However, more recently India's policy on Tibet has been mindful of Chinese sensibilities, and has recognized Tibet as a part of China.
Dr. Rifaat Hussain is a Pakistani political scientist, professor, defense analyst and television personality whose career in the academia spans over four decades. Hussain served as the executive director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS) from 2005 to 2008, a Colombo-based think tank in Sri Lanka, and spent two terms as visiting professor at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). The New York Times Magazine has described Hussain as a "leading Pakistani foreign policy thinker."
China's salami slicing is a geopolitical strategy involving a series of small steps allegedly taken by the government of China that would become a larger gain which would have been difficult or unlawful to perform all at once. When discussing this concept, notedly debated in the publications of the Lowy Institute from Australia, some defenders of the concept are Brahma Chellaney, Jasjit Singh, Bipin Rawat or the ORF from India or the USIP, Bonnie S. Glaser (CSIS) or Erik Voeten from the US, while detractors are H. S. Panag from India or Linda Jakobson. Advocates of the term have cited examples such as the territorial disputes in the South China Sea and along the Sino-Indian border.
Chinese imperialism refers to the expansion of China's political, economic, and cultural influence beyond the boundaries of the People's Republic of China. Depending on the commentator, it has also been used to refer to its artificial islands in the South China Sea and the persecution of Uyghurs in China. Although there has not been a long-standing imperial regime in China since the 1911 Revolution and the country is officially a People's Republic, some refer to China as an imperialist country. This includes socialist parties in the Pacific such as the New People's Army, the Japanese Communist Party, some Maoist parties, and the New Left. China's relations with Africa have also been accused of being "neo-colonialism".
