Abstract

There is a visible shift underway with the announced strategic disengagement of the United States and the emerging economic and strategic role of India and China in the Middle East. This trend has accelerated since 2021 but has been complicated by the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks. China and India’s significant involvement in the region impacts not only their energy security but also their regional postures, their relations with other global players, and increasingly their own domestic societal and political orders. This presentation looks at how China and India’s increased and concurrent engagement with the region has gradually shaped their positions towards regional issues like the Gaza crisis, but also how this engagement has been perceived and managed by the US, as well as by Middle Eastern actors.

Speaker

Nicolas Blarel

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. 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).

Discussant

Sumitha Narayanan Kutty

Sumitha Narayanan Kutty is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Centre for Grand Strategy, King’s College London and an adjunct research associate at RSIS, Singapore. She specializes in issues related to international security, intervention and rising powers with an empirical focus on South Asia, West Asia / Middle East and the Indo-Pacific, including fieldwork experience in Iran, Israel and the UAE.

She has published in International Studies Quarterly, International Politics, Washington Quarterlyand Asia Policy among other journals and is co-editor of India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership. Her expertise has been featured in Bloomberg, Channel News Asia, Lawfare, South Asian Voices, South China Morning Post, The Diplomat, The Hindu and Hindustan Times.

Sumitha holds multiple degrees in journalism from India and a master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown University, Washington DC. She recently defended her doctoral thesis examining the decline in Indian foreign military interventionism at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Chair

Anit Mukherjee

Anit Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer at the King's India Institute. He joined King's after ten years in Singapore where he was an Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. From 2010-2012, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), New Delhi.

He is the author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats and the Military in India (NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), which examines the role of civil-military relations and military effectiveness. He is the co-editor of India-China Maritime Competition: The Security Dilemma at Sea (Routledge, 2019) and India’s Naval Strategy and Asian Security (Routledge, 2015).

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