Southeast Asia is often described as a confluence zone situated between the South of China and East of India. ASEAN and its affiliate institutions, as manifestations of Southeast Asian regional aspirations, are at the centre stage of the Indo-Pacific region, directly impacted by the major power politics involving not just the US–China dynamics but the growing role of India, Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, Russia, and the European Union as well. Notwithstanding initial successes and failures of post-War Asian regionalism, Indian and Chinese institutional engagement with ASEAN only began during the 1990s. Over the past three-and-a-half decades, ASEAN’s ties with both India and China have progressed well with the region attracting greater diplomatic competition among stakeholders vying for economic and soft power influence as well as strategic leverage. This paper aims to analyse the extent to which Southeast Asian engagement with China and/or India could lead to polarisation or partnership. It also aims to examine the conditions under which the potential downside of polarisation competes with the benefits of the partnership. This paper argues that while ASEAN could exercise moderating influence on the two Asian giants in pursuing greater cooperation with the region, its ability to do so gets severely constrained if India–China relations take a more confrontational turn. In essence, ASEAN’s cooperation with China and India hinges on two critically important aspects: (1) China and India’s own interests and aspirations in the Indo-Pacific regional dynamics as well as their bilateral equations and (2) ASEAN’s ability to lead the regional discourse in favour of multipolarity and multilateralism by keeping its normative agency intact.
This study examines how citizens evaluated the legitimacy of freedom-restricting measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on EU member states during the early phase of the pandemic, the analysis explores how political trust, evaluations of government responses, economic perceptions, and individual characteristics were associated with public attitudes toward emergency restrictions. Using individual-level survey data, the findings suggest that higher levels of trust in government and healthcare institutions, as well as more positive evaluations of pandemic responses, were associated with greater acceptance of restrictive measures. In contrast, individuals experiencing greater economic hardship were less likely to regard such measures as legitimate. Perceptions regarding the balance between public health and economic concerns also played an important role, indicating that citizens were more likely to support restrictions when policies were viewed as balanced and proportionate. These findings underscore the importance of political trust, institutional performance, and economic vulnerability in shaping public acceptance of emergency measures and provide baseline evidence for understanding legitimacy in future democratic crisis governance.
The period of the Act East Policy (AEP) has seen an increase in the intensity of defence engagement with Southeast Asia. Though India is not a major arms supplier to Southeast Asian countries. It has aspirations to become a major defence partner of Southeast Asia, which it is trying to build through its defence engagement, consisting of military exercises, port visits, military dialogues, training courses, joint exercises and Coordinated Patrols (CORPATs). By tracing India’s defence engagement with Southeast Asian countries from the beginning of the Look East Policy (LEP) in 1992, the article uncovers the underlying reasons behind the transformation in the intensity of India’s defence engagement with Southeast Asia. The findings reveal the following four factors behind the increase in the intensity of defence engagement: Southeast Asian countries’ desire for India to play a greater role in the region, the USA push for India to play a more active role in the region, India’s deterioration in relations with China, and its rising economic interests. It highlights the potential of India’s extensive defence engagement in opening up the possibility of broader defence cooperation with Southeast Asian countries at a time when other regional stakeholders, such as Japan and Australia, are steadfast in grabbing up the opportunities presented by the great power competition between the USA and China in the region.
India’s evolving relationship with Southeast Asian nations over the past decade offers intriguing insights. Despite the differences in the political systems and forms of governance, India’s presence in Southeast Asia has grown robustly. While India’s civilizational ties with the region date back centuries, the past decade has seen these cultural connections leveraged to strengthen relationships and advance strategic and economic interests. The Act East Policy, a significant shift from the Look East Policy (from merely recognizing the geostrategic significance of Southeast Asia to India to a tangible set of measures), positions India as a key stakeholder in the region. This paper argues that India’s bilateral and multilateral relationships with the Southeast Asian countries transcend the existing conceptual and theoretical frameworks, blending nationalism with internationalism. The Act East Policy seamlessly integrates civilizational ties and strategic interests. This paper explores and critically analyses the processes, concrete measures and values through which the Act East Policy operates.
Although Taiwan remains formally absent from India’s Act East Policy (AEP) due to diplomatic constraints, its expanding economic, technological, and strategic engagement warrants a reassessment of how the policy operates in practice. This article bridges the gap between the AEP’s declaratory framework and its operational implementation, arguing that Taiwan has emerged as a de facto and functionally embedded participant in India’s eastward strategy. Since the 1990s, and more markedly under the Narendra Modi government, India–Taiwan cooperation has expanded across trade, investment, science and technology, education, and semiconductor collaboration in ways that closely align with core Act East objectives, including economic connectivity, technological upgrading, and supply chain diversification. Through informal, sector-specific, and non-diplomatic mechanisms, India has accommodated Taiwan within the implementation of the AEP despite the absence of formal diplomatic recognition. In this context, the article adopts a functional and analytical lens to establish that the policy outcomes, rather than formal policy texts, help understand Taiwan’s role within the AEP. It contends that Taiwan occupies a consequential yet an analytically underexamined position within the AEP when assessed through operational alignment, policy instruments, and strategic practice rather than declaratory inclusion alone.
India’s economic and strategic engagement with the Indo-Pacific has expanded markedly since the launch of the Act East Policy, yet its integration into the region’s economic architecture remains limited and uneven. Drawing on the metaphor of a “confluence of the two seas”, this paper examines why India’s presence across the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific remains tepid despite dense diplomatic activity and multiple institutional affiliations. It traces the distinctive evolution of Asian regionalism, contrasting ASEAN’s and APEC’s soft, consensus-based approach with European models, and assesses how intensifying US–China rivalry, shifting trade architectures (APEC, RCEP, CPTPP, IPEF), and the proliferation of minilateral arrangements constrains India’s room for manoeuvre. The analysis then turns to India’s domestic political economy, highlighting how structural vulnerabilities, protectionist constituencies, and regulatory frictions have produced a pattern of selective and often defensive trade policy that limits India’s role in regional value chains and rule-making processes. The paper argues that recent developments may mark an inflection point. The review of the ASEAN–India FTA (AIFTA) and renewed debate on India’s APEC membership illustrate both the persistence of integration challenges and the possibility of more calibrated liberalisation. Most significantly, the conclusion of a high-standard EU–India Free Trade Agreement in 2026—covering goods, services, investment, government procurement, digital trade, and sustainable development—is analysed as a potential turning point in India’s trade policy, signalling a willingness to accept deeper, rules-heavy commitments under favourable conditions. The EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy and Global Gateway initiative are situated as a “European variable” that reshapes India’s options by offering a non-confrontational, rules-based partner and an inter-regional bridge between European and Indo-Pacific economic architectures. The paper contends that if India leverages this agreement, along with targeted FTA upgrades and minilateral partnerships, as platforms rather than exceptions, it can gradually convert its economic weight and strategic relevance into more credible, embedded regional economic engagement. In doing so, the confluence of the two seas can shift from aspirational metaphor to tangible network of trade, investment, and regulatory linkages in which India plays a genuinely pivotal role.
This paper examines the role of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in advancing regional economic integration between ASEAN and its key dialogue partners, India and China. It explores India’s historical, trade, and investment relations with these actors and highlights the complex dynamics that led to India’s withdrawal from the RCEP. Although this decision is often regarded as a prudent measure to protect domestic industries from competitive pressures, it has also underscored India’s marginalisation within the Asia-Pacific economic landscape and its limited capacity to balance regional influence whilst managing relations with China. Recent geopolitical developments, including adjustments in the multilateral trade environment and the restructuring of global supply chains, have further intensified the complexity of India’s strategic decision-making. In response, the paper develops a three-tier evaluative framework that considers India’s global positioning, regional cooperation networks, and economic resilience in assessing the feasibility of its participation in RCEP. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of trade patterns, investment trends, and relevant institutional developments, the study compares RCEP’s multilateral framework with India’s existing bilateral trade arrangements and examines how these institutional differences shape India’s strategic choices. Finally, the paper provides policy recommendations on whether India should revisit its position and outlines a strategic pathway for India’s engagement in RCEP and the broader role it can play in shaping the future of regional and global trade governance.
As artificial intelligence reshapes how banks verify identity and deliver services, the question of who gets access, and on whose terms, has become impossible to ignore. This article examines Indonesia: a country with formal disability rights legislation, ambitious digital-finance targets, and a banking sector that is digitising rapidly, but where enforcement of inclusion obligations remains patchy and uneven. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Jakarta, Banten, and Yogyakarta conducted between July and October 2024, we show how the experiences of people with disabilities (PwD) expose the limits of Indonesia’s inclusion architecture at the very points where automated systems become gatekeepers. Across the three provinces, the same institutional pattern recurs: accessibility is rarely measured, never routinely audited, and enforced only when someone complains, which is precisely when it is least likely to be accessible. PwD experience is used here to make visible weaknesses in institutional design, because barriers accumulate where automated finance is least flexible and where the consequences of design failures are hardest to negotiate around. The article draws comparative implications for governance contexts across Asia and Europe where financial digitisation is accelerating ahead of the institutions designed to govern it.
High-level strategic dialogues (SDs) constitute a central political pillar of China–Europe relations, yet their strategic functioning as institutionalised dialogue mechanisms remains under-examined. This paper investigates how China employs the SD mechanism to engage with Europe and pursue its foreign-policy objectives within the liberal international order (LIO). The study adopts a document-driven qualitative design combining grounded-theory coding with abductive reasoning. The dataset comprises 59 China-issued SD records corresponding to 75 dialogue rounds between 2001 and 2025. Using the complementary analytical lenses of forum shopping and altercasting, the analysis examines how differentiated dialogue venues and signalling repertoires structure expectations of cooperation, responsibility, disagreement management, and systemic roles within institutionalised interaction. The findings show that China’s SD engagement operates through a differentiated dialogue architecture combined with recurring signalling practices that stabilise participation across institutional settings while enabling incremental reinterpretation of governance vocabularies and role expectations. Building on these empirical patterns, the paper advances a mid-range interpretive framework linking strategic identity (the strategist–reformist actor), institutional practice (institutionalisation as diplomacy), and the patterned outcome of continuity with recalibration. The analysis demonstrates how routinised diplomatic engagement within institutionalised dialogue mechanisms can simultaneously sustain interactional continuity and facilitate incremental normative recalibration, contributing to broader debates on major-power behaviour toward the LIO.
The evolving geopolitical dynamics are positioning the deployment of transnational infrastructure as a strategic instrument for regional development, highlighting its symbolic value beyond purely economic effects. Existing discussions on state-led infrastructure in global production networks (GPNs) have primarily focused on the hierarchical interactions among economic actors centered on the infrastructure projects and resulting uneven development outcomes. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the historical and spatial conditions shaping the emergence of such infrastructure, or to its combined economic and intangible impacts on specific industrial clusters in the geopolitical narratives. Drawing upon the conjunctural GPN perspective, this study examines the role of the China-Europe Railway Express (CR Express) under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Specifically, we focus on its impact on the evolution of laptop cluster in Chongqing, a centrally governed municipality in western China. The paper argues that, economically, the CR Express, as a transnational infrastructure, has facilitated the expansion of laptop manufacturing in Chongqing into the European market by offering crucial advantages in transportation time and costs. Symbolically, Chongqing has repositioned itself as a growing logistics hub and assembly platform along the Eurasian economic corridor. By incorporating spatiotemporal conjunctures, this study extends the typitcal firm-centric cost-benefit analysis of GPN research to the broader geoeconomic value of transnational infrastructure, thereby highlighting the BRI’s role in local industrial cluster evolution. The findings shed light on how regions in the Global South can leverage infrastructural conjunctures to forge new pathways for development through production and market connectivity.
This study examines Japan’s policy adjustments between 2023 and 2025 in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. It argues that these adjustments are best understood as Japan’s attempt to navigate the enduring alliance dilemma—the perennial tension between fear of abandonment by its senior partner and fear of entrapment in its conflicts. The shocks of Trump’s first term (2017–2021)—trade pressure, security uncertainty, and unilateralism—provided a powerful historical catalyst, sharply intensifying Tokyo’s perception of these twin risks. In response, Japan adopted a composite strategy blending proactive engagement with prudent risk hedging across high-level diplomacy, economic diversification, defense posture, and multilateral institution-building. The paper finds that Japan’s behavior resembles a dynamic risk mitigation mechanism: activated by historical experience but fundamentally shaped by the structural logic of the alliance dilemma, rather than a fully developed grand strategy. Its effectiveness remains constrained by domestic politics, U.S.–China competition, and the future trajectory of U.S. policy. The case illustrates both the possibilities and the inherent limits of hedging as a middle-power strategy under conditions of hegemonic uncertainty.
This article investigates how European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discursively reconciles the European Union’s (EU) self-proclaimed identity as a “normative power” with its adoption of the securitized “de-risking” strategy towards China. Employing Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) framework of practical argumentation, this study analyzes nine key speeches delivered by von der Leyen between 2023 and 2025. The analysis reconstructs the argumentative structure underpinning the de-risking narrative and identifies its core circumstantial, value, and goal-mean premises. This reveals a manipulated discursive mechanism that navigates the tension between normative ideals and geopolitical imperatives. Specifically, the research demonstrates how von der Leyen’s rhetoric strategically modulates threat narratives, reconfigures EU values as conditional preconditions for cooperation, and recasts defensive security measures as necessary instruments for upholding a rules-based international order. This article argues that the EU’s de-risking discourse cannot be simply regarded as a retreat from the EU’s normative identity, but rather a strategic reconstruction of its normative identity for geopolitical imperatives, which is packaged as the so-called “strategic-normative power.
How do US allies respond when security dependence on Washington collides with deep economic exposure to China? This article argues that renewed US protectionism has intensified an alliance dilemma that does not produce uniform alignment, but differentiated forms of hedging. Rather than choosing sides, allies seek to manage simultaneous risks: security abandonment by the USA, economic disruption from decoupling, and vulnerability to coercion from both Washington and Beijing. Building on the hedging literature, the article develops a framework to explain variation in allied hedging across three dimensions: security dependence on the USA, economic exposure to China, and institutional capacity for autonomous adjustment. It identifies three ideal-typical responses: institutional hedging, functional hedging, and diversification hedging. Through comparative analysis of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, the UK, Australia, and Canada, the article shows that US protectionism does not eliminate hedging; instead, it reshapes its form. The findings suggest that allied hedging has become more institutionalized, more issue-specific, and more closely tied to economic resilience and supply-chain governance. This trend does not imply alliance breakdown, but it does indicate growing fragmentation within the US-led order and a weakening of institutional trust among allies.
The Liberal International Order (LIO) is increasingly under threat—not only from revisionist and authoritarian states like China and Russia but also from within the USA itself. Unlike his predecessors, who recognized significant benefits for the USA in upholding and defending the rules-based order globally and in the Indo-Pacific, President Donald Trump views the existing LIO as detrimental to American interests. This special issue brings together scholars in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to examine the mounting challenges facing the LIO in the Indo-Pacific. Crucially, the contributions highlight that there has never been a shared consensus on what the LIO—or more neutrally: the rules-based order—entails, but a fragile coexistence of visions. The Indo-Pacific, as a geopolitical and normative crossroads, offers an unparalleled vantage point to test whether pluralism can coexist with rules, and whether middle powers and regional and minilateral organizations such as the European Union (EU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or the Quad can act as custodians of order rather than bystanders to intensifying great-power rivalries, likely resulting in a fragmented and divided rather than truly multilateral and inclusive order in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, the debate surrounding the future of the Liberal International Order has intensified in recent years as geopolitical rivalries, institutional fragmentation, and competing governance models reshape global politics. Nowhere are these tensions more visible than in the Indo-Pacific where the intersection of European and Asian strategic interests reveals both the vulnerabilities and adaptive possibilities of the existing order. This special issue brings these two regions into a shared analytical frame to examine how their interactions shape the evolving contours of the rules-based international system.
This article examines the evolving approaches of the European Union (EU) and China toward the Middle Corridor (MC), an emerging strategic route in Eurasia. While the Russia-Ukraine war has been the primary catalyst for this shift, a central puzzle emerges: is the heightened focus on the MC a temporary reaction or a durable, long-term realignment of Eurasian connectivity? The motivations for each power are distinct yet complementary. The EU is driven by the need to enhance its energy security and curb Russian influence, while China seeks to secure its transport corridors and diversify trade routes away from potential chokepoints. This paper argues that these changes are not a temporary response to the war. On the contrary, we contend that the convergence of interests on the MC represents a fundamental and long-term shift in Eurasian connectivity. This trend is further solidified by looming geopolitical uncertainties, such as the prospect of a “Reverse Nixon” strategy under a second Trump administration, which would increase vulnerabilities for both Brussels and Beijing. Ultimately, the new politics surrounding the Middle Corridor will have far-reaching geo-economic and geopolitical implications for the entire continent.
The European Union is following two incompatible economic strategies. On the one hand, the European Union wants to be a player in geopolitics and intends to use trade policy to increase its power in international relations. On the other hand, Brussels wants to set standards, particularly in three fields: the production of certain products shall have little or no CO2 emissions, people in developing countries shall not be exploited and agricultural products shall not be coming from recently deforested land. Whilst the good intentions of the policy makers in Brussels are obvious and laudable, the effects of the three measures will reduce the European Union’s relevance in international economic relations. Rather than improving the welfare of people in developing countries, the EU’s policies are leading to self-isolation and a diminishing relevance of Brussels. Today, economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America have the option of doing business with China, Russia and non-aligned countries. A European Union that insists on unilateral measures in international trade weakens, rather than strengthens, its relevance in international affairs.
The Indo-Pacific is gradually becoming the world’s most significant maritime region in both geopolitical and geoeconomic terms. In recent years, many extra-regional actors, including several European states, have acknowledged this condition by publishing a number of Indo-Pacific strategies. In light of Italy’s economic, political, and strategic interests in this area, however, the absence of a dedicated Italian policy on the Indo-Pacific stands out. Against this backdrop, this article contributes to recent debates by providing the first scholarly research specifically assessing Italy’s potential Indo-Pacific strategy. To that end, it contextualises the Indo-Pacific’s significance and it explains the growing interest in this region with the support of international relations theories. Next, it outlines the advantages and hazards concerning the country’s renewed attention to the Indo-Pacific, which are then assessed through a cost–benefit analysis of the potential Italian strategy. It finds that although there are several potential risks, which ought to be addressed in the future, these do not pose actual obstacles to the development of a formal regional policy. Additionally, the cost–benefit analysis reveals that the advantages outweigh the risks. Consequently, it concludes that the time is ripe for the development of a multilateral, cooperative, and flexible Italian strategy for the Indo-Pacific, which this article argues would benefit from seven elements. These are multilateralism, stability, prosperity, cooperation, security, synergy, and connectivity. As a novel research on a significant yet under-examined topic, this article provides a useful contribution to the study of both Italian foreign policy and Indo-Pacific security.
China’s substantial flow of development finance (DF) to Africa has sparked abundant discussions on the divergent distributive politics between China and traditional donors. This article compares the DF allocation strategies of China and the European Union (EU) and investigates the underlying motives of why they favor certain recipients than others. The comparison is incorporated into two aid allocation models in current literature: donor interest and recipient demand. The analysis draws on data covering both Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Other Official Finance (OOF) over the period from 2000 to 2017. Mapping of the data reveals the divergent strategies of China and the EU in financing volumes, geographic allocation and sectoral targeting, paired with tactical convergence including overlapping recipient focus and a shared emphasis on economic infrastructure. Moreover, China’s DF conveys a mixed portfolio of OOF-dominant in aggregate yet concessional in many recipient countries. Using country-fixed effects regressions, the article finds that ODA allocations by both China and the EU are largely decoupled from economic covariates. However, EU ODA is systematically higher in more democratic and less politically stable countries. By contrast, both actors’ OOF is trade-sensitive but in different ways: China’s OOF comoves with both exports to and imports from China, whereas EU OOF declines with EU exports and rises with EU imports. The findings suggest that the distributive politics of China and the EU reflect a complex interplay of overlapping and cross-cutting factors, warranting context- and instrument-specific analysis.
