This volume will explore the role of India and China in regional geopolitics, with a focus on Southeast Asia. It highlights some of the key events and turning points in the evolving equations since the times of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister. In six chapters, it shows how Indias prominent position in devising the regional architecture in Asia was diluted after the Bandung era, especially after the Indo-China war in 1962. The author maintains that, relative to its earlier status as a major champion of Asian regionalism, India had become a political and diplomatic non-entity, if not a pariah, in Southeast Asia by the 1980s. While China emerged as the most important political entity in the region over the next three decades, India gradually made substantial inroads into the ASEAN scene, more so after its emergence as a 'rising' power in the post-Cold War era and economic reforms of 1991. This book revisits the question of contemporary Asian security from an Indian vantage point, posing critical questions about the future of regional leadership in Southeast Asia, and demonstrating how it depends as much on the India-China-Southeast Asia relationship as on China-US-Japan relations.

About the Author
Amitav Acharya is Distinguished Professor andthe UNESCO chairperson in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, USA. His major publications on Southeast Asia include Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order (2001), The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region (2013), and Whose Ideas Matter?: Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism (2009).

Reviews
...a lucid and readable book that rightly asks us to reconsider visions unfulfilled, paths not taken and the historical background to present challenges. * Ian Hall, Griffith University, Australia, International Affairs *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199461141
Author Amitav Acharya
Format Hardback
Page Count 260
Imprint OUP India
Publisher OUP India