The Bay of Bengal is the largest bay off the coast of Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. With the exception of Bangladesh all the littoral states have reached agreements over their bilateral maritime boundaries. As signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, India and Myanmar had to file their claims by June 29, 2009 and by May 21, 2009 respectively, and Bangladesh has to file its claim by July 27, 2011 to the Commission on the limits of the continental shelf.

• Sreeradha Datta |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Of the members of the America-Russia-China triangle, the Soviet Union is the least enthusiastic about its existence. It is open to question whether it is as obsessed as it is said to be with the historic memories of the golden hordes who devastated Russian lands, and whether it equates the Chinese with the dreaded Mongol invaders of previous centuries. But there can be little doubt that it fears a Sino-US collusion against itself.

• Girilal Jain |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

As high-profile incidents of piracy become more common off Somalia, strategists have taken to urging the US government to send expeditionary forces ashore. The article uses history and Clausewitzian theory to estimate the nature of the threat and the likely efficacy of a land campaign. Even successful operations would entail costs exceeding the value of the political stakes. For this reason alone, going ashore is inadvisable.

• James R. Holmes |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Shamshad A. Khan |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Terrorism in the Indian hinterland is the result of a complex set of inter-related factors. The development of a jihad culture in Pakistan during the course of the Afghan conflict in the 1980s led to the subsequent Pakistani decision to employ jihad against India as a strategy. The mobilisation of the Hindu Right in India and ensuing communal violence led to the radicalisation of Muslim youth and the resort to terrorism by both Indian Islamists and Muslim criminal networks with help from Pakistan.

• S. Kalyanaraman |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Bharat Wariavwalla's ‘Name of the Game is Interdependence’ is a thoughtful and elegantly written essay that has insights for both the theoretically inclined academic as well as the policy wonk. The essay can almost neatly be divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the constraints that are imposed on contemporary great power relations (especially between China and the United States) because of multiple levels of interdependence.

• Amitabh Matto |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Ashok K. Behuria |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

As I have understood Bharat Wariavwalla's thoughtful article, and from the current discourse on geostrategic global balance, three central issues can be raised. First, we live in an interdependent world that is the outcome of a globalised economy. Therefore, no country can expect to wield unconstrained power or strategic hegemony, which allows it to disregard either universally accepted behavioural norms or even national sovereignty. Therefore, it is irrelevant to talk of a unipolar world.

• Rajiv Kumar |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Arvind Gupta |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

According to Bharat Wariavwalla, the Manmohan Singh-led government ‘believes that the US rules supreme and that the closer we stay with it the better we serve our interests. America will fight terror, secure us in the South Asian region and make us a world power’. In order to battle such a predilection, his article seeks to show the constraints on US power, mostly vis-à-vis the emerging superpower, China, which he implicitly sees as an emerging threat to India.

• M. D. Nalapat |
• July 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis