India's spatial imaginations of South Asia: power, commerce, and community
In: The Oxford International Relations in South Asia Series
In: Oxford scholarship online
In: Political Science
Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India's foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. This volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime.