Indo-Pacific Strategies

This book focuses on the Indo-Pacific region's growing prominence as the world's major powers gravitate toward this space to expand their influence. With dynamic shifts taking place in the globe's most strategically volatile region, Indo-Pacific Strategies aims at clarifying the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, expounded both as a strategic concept and nascent region, thus contributing to the burgeoning policy and academic debate. The book offers indispensable insights and appropriate remedies to maintain the rules-based international order as threatened by China's increasingly assertive and bellicose posturing. It offers up-to-date analyses of Covid-19-related geopolitical trends, the strategies of various Indo-Pacific states against the backdrop of great power competition, the increasingly confrontational stance of Indo-Pacific states against China and the 2020 US election results. This unique book presents deep insights into the roles of Eurasia, small island states, the Middle East and Africa, in addition to Australia, India, Japan and the US, thereby providing much needed comparative studies. It also closely investigates the strategic and tactical operationalization of the Indo-Pacific, making it an essential read for scholars, policymakers, students, and strategists in the field of international politics and Area Studies. Excerpt from the foreword by ABE Shinzo, (former) Prime Minister of Japan "I think this book is the timeliest attempt to bring together the wisdom of eleven people to present a multifaceted view of the FOIP [Free and Open Indo-Pacific]. As a reader, I would like to express my gratitude to the editors and contributors for their valuable intellectual contributions." See the preview function on this website to access the full text.

Brendon J. Cannon is Assistant Professor of International Security at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His research is at the nexus of international relations, security studies and geopolitics. He is the co-editor of Con-ict and Cooperation in the Indo-Paci-c (2020), also published by Routledge. Kei Hakata is Professor at Seikei University, Japan. He specializes in international politics and security affairs in the Indo-Paci-c. Previously, he worked for the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he dealt with Africa and of-cial development assistance.

Part I Contextualizing the Indo-Pacific 1. The Indo-Pacific as an emerging geography of strategies 2. The Indo-Pacific's evolving strategic landscape: Geopolitics as a framework for grand strategy? Part II Indo-Pacific lynchpins 3. Building Australia's unified regional strategy through the Indo-Pacific concept 4. India's Indo-Pacific prism: Finding strategic autonomy in the face of Chinese adventurism 5. Japan and the Indo-Pacific: The formation of geostrategy 6. Indo-Pacific positioning of the United States: Evaluating dis/continuities Part III East Asia and the Indo-Pacific 7. China's foreign policy transformation and its implications for the Indo-Pacific 8. ASEAN in search of a common strategy in the Indo-Pacific, Renato Cruz de Castro Part IV Frontlines of the Indo-Pacific 9. Small island states' security in the Indo-Pacific 10. Europe's Indo-Pacific puzzle: In search of an independent foreign policy 11. Arab Gulf States in the Indo-Pacific: The limits of ambiguous hedging strategies 12. Influence and power in the Western Indo-Pacific: Lessons from Eastern Africa