India as a Regional Great Power: in Pursuit of Shakti

Abstract

Contemporary international relations theory is marked by its relative neglect of regional subsystems. Barry Buzan in a recent study laments that in ‘the absence of any developed sense of region, security analysis tends to polarise between the global system level on the one hand, and the national security level of individual states on the other ... Both perspectives miss the regional level, which comprises the dynamic of security relations among the local states’.1 In the case of South Asia, this is a problem well illustrated by the few studies whose point of departure is the complex of intraregional security relations.2 South Asia is marked by a relative absence of regional cooperation and an asymmetry of power relations where, at least since the vivisection of Pakistan in 1971, India predominates.