Dr. Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs and Director General of the Jindal India Institute of O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. He is a leading opinion columnist on world affairs for Indian newspapers Dainik Jagran (Hindi) and Hindustan Times (English) and a commentator on international current issues on radio and television. He anchors the ‘Indian Diplomacy’ TV show on India’s national broadcaster, Doordarshan. He is a contributing editor for People Who Influenced the World (Murray Books, 2005), and has authored International Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (I.B. Tauris, 2011), Politics of the Global Economic Crisis: Regulation, Responsibility and Radicalism (Routledge, 2013), Modi Doctrine: The Foreign Policy of India’s Prime Minister (Bloomsbury, 2016), Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Crunch Time: Narendra Modi’s National Security Crises (Rupa Publications, 2022). His forthcoming book is Friends: India’s Closest Strategic Partners. He tweets on global developments @sreeramchaulia.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

As a discipline, International Relations (IR) has always followed the empirical trail. The most exciting debates will always be in response to changing global events and circumstances. I think the biggest question is about the current stage of global power configuration – is it bipolar, multipolar, or nascent multipolar? These questions and debates are not new, but in times of power transition, they are most significant. If we say we are moving towards a multipolar world order, then what would this order be like – stable, violent, or disruptive? Power transition is certainly one of the main issues. The huge gaps that existed in the unipolar and bipolar eras may dissolve into something very competitive and a conflict-prone world. Organski and others wrote about it long ago, but the speed of change in the real world today is tremendous. This is where the most fascinating debates are.

If you read works from ten years ago, they seem so outdated today. This just reflects empirical reality and how it is running far ahead of scholarship and theory. We need to make sense of this change and transition. We are used to thinking in terms of what is called a ‘post-Cold War era.’ In my assessment, that is over. We are in a new era. Defining that new era, its contours, and this more populated space of major powers will force us, in the scholarly world, to rethink our assumptions. The categories of great, middle, and small powers may require significant revision. Then there is also the issue of power diffusion – who is going to build a different world order? Who will take the lead? There has already been a lot of debate about the liberal international order mainly by Western scholars because they are highly worried and anxious that it is collapsing or has already collapsed. What will replace it? All these I think are the defining questions of our time.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I think it is not just me but the entire scholarly community coming to grips with the fact that the rise of China has been a fundamentally game-changing development. Just ten years ago, China would still be bracketed as one of the emerging or rising powers, if not a middle power. For a long time, it was even called a middle power. But now there is a universal consensus that it is already a great power. This singular development, in many ways, is restructuring or reordering the world. I have been following quite closely, what this means for India’s neighbourhood and spaces in Asia – which is of course China’s prime domain – but also elsewhere in the world (for example, the Global South). The potential for great power war or regional wars fueled by US-China competition (or ‘extreme competition’ as U.S. President Joe Biden calls it) is a pertinent issue. One has to look at great powers and what they are doing. A lot of people resent IR literature for being great power-centric. But their role is absolutely critical; they throw their weight around, intervene in many parts of the world, and exacerbate (if not create fresh) rivalries. It is crucial that we study their behaviour and competition.

I would not have thought of China’s rise as such a primary concern ten years ago. In those days, we were still discussing the soft balancing of all rising powers against US hegemony. But now the situation is much more complex. For many countries in the Indo-Pacific, balancing is against China, not against the US anymore. There was a time when many of us from the Global South considered US Dollar dominance or American interference in different regions of the world and its wars to be the foremost global issue. But we have increasingly moved in other directions, because of the tectonic shifts linked to China’s rise.

Has the field of strategic studies........

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