Abstract:  Indian economic and strategic involvement in the Middle East has seen a transformation over the past two decades. This development has happened as many observers remark a gradual decline of US influence juxtaposed with China’s growing presence in the region. How has India managed its bilateral relations with China within this region of increasing economic and strategic interest? The core argument is that India’s strategy has been shaped by both a perception of declining US’ engagement in the Middle East and by opportunities created by new strategic hedging strategies from key regional players such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran. India moved over the last decade from a strategy of buck-passing on US’ security provision to one of partial soft balancing of China’s strategic presence in the Middle East. However, the standard theories of balance-of-power and strategic hedging are limited to account for India’s multifaceted approach towards a regional order in flux.

Speaker: Nicolas Blarel is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University in The Netherlands. He studies foreign and security policy-making, the politics of power transition in the international order, the politics of migration governance, and the international politics of South Asia.

His current research project centers more specifically on the decentralisation and regionalisation of the foreign policy decision-making process in India. Nicolas has also studied India’s relations with the Middle East and has published The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922 (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has co-edited with Crystal Ennis the book The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex (Bristol University Press).