Abstract

The Chair: Currently the Emeritus Fellow in International Relations, Sidney Sussex College, Prof. James Mayall has written and published widely on the international relations of African states, North-South relations, international theory and the impact of nationalism on international relations.

The Speaker: Rityusha Mani Tiwary is the Pavate Fellow at Sydney Sussex College and is associated with Center for Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. Her chief research interests include China’s foreign and economic policy, regional networks, power, strategy and international relations in East Asia. She can be reached at rmt49@cam.ac.uk.

Abstract

This paper examines the unique features of ‘power’ and ‘regional leadership’ discourse in Indian and Chinese international relation theories. Given each country’s veritable intellectual traditions identifying the core of leadership, an attempt is made to define and contextualise certain comparative parameters. The central proposition of this article is that there is a certain degree of congruence in the two discourses on ‘power’ and ‘leadership’ where both the countries. However, the trajectories of foreign policy decision making digress owing to the treatment to these concepts in the light of historicity of thoughts and events. The regions of South Asia and East Asia are taken as respective geopolitical references where the foreign policies of India and China are reflected in terms of power projections and leadership potentials.