To begin with, Washington should use its military presence more nimbly, increasing its interaction with small nations and littoral countries. Most importantly, all powers, including the United States, should look at the Indian Ocean as one continuous theater and avoid seeing the region only through subdivisional silos.
Otherwise, they may fail to notice developments happening across the region. Paying attention to just one part of the ocean is not enough when there are so many players and shifting alliances and partnerships.
Finally, the United States and its partners should make better use of the key island territories they already hold in the Indian Ocean, which provide strategic access and reach over important areas of the ocean.
They could provide fresh opportunities for countries to work together to address the emerging threats and challenges in the Indian Ocean. Nontraditional security issues such as climate change, illegal fishing, drug smuggling, and human trafficking will come to play a bigger role in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean. If the competition is over sustaining presence and missions in strategically important parts of the ocean—such as the choke points mentioned earlier—the island nations and African littorals will come to assume a central role.
While these issues may be considered soft or secondary, they are deeply relevant to the island nations. These issues also carry strategic implications, such as for fishing vessels and scientific missions used for surveillance and reconnaissance purposes.
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees. The World Unpacked is a biweekly foreign policy podcast that breaks down the hottest global issues of today with experts, journalists, and policymakers who can explain what is happening, why it matters, and where we go from here.
In an increasingly crowded, chaotic, and contested world and marketplace of ideas, the Carnegie Endowment offers decisionmakers global, independent, and strategic insight and innovative ideas that advance international peace.
You are leaving the website for the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and entering a website for another of Carnegie's global centers. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center. Programs Projects Regions Blogs Podcasts. What Is Happening in the Indian Ocean? Darshana M. Summary: Dizzyingly enormous and varied in topography and culture, the Indian Ocean is critical to global trade, security, and geopolitics. As countries jostle for influence in its crowded waterways, how will the new power dynamics play out?
Related Media and Tools. Print Page. Thank you! As per a memorandum of understanding MOU signed in by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his Mauritian counterpart, India would set up infrastructure for improving air and sea connectivity. With Seychelles, India has agreed on developing infrastructure on Assumption Island.
India has also helped Victoria with ocean mapping to protect Seychelles exclusive economic zone and has donated aircraft and launched a radar project.
However, it is also important to note that Mauritius and Seychelles, being the small islands that they are, may not align with India to the point of isolating China completely in the IOR.
The United States, on the other hand, can definitely provide India with logistics. India is a part of several bilateral and multilateral military exercises in the Indian Ocean.
The edition of the exercise has been postponed in the wake of COVID pandemic but is expected to be the largest iteration of the exercise, with the projected participation of 30 foreign navies.
Exercise Malabar is a trilateral maritime event between India, Japan, and the United States and aims at strengthening cooperation and enhancing interoperability among participants.
In , India prepared to expand the grouping by including Australia as well. Military exercises in the IOR are significant due to the increasing Chinese threat.
Separately, in June , the Indian Navy increased its surveillance and operational deployment in the IOR, with the Galwan clash as a backdrop. The Indian Navy also held an important exercise with its Japanese counterparts in the IOR, where Chinese naval vessels and submarines make persistent incursions.
As a move to strengthen itself at the IOR, India has increased its military capacity from operating only in the neighborhood to operating in the entire region—from the Malacca Strait to the waters off the African coasts.
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, when the world order is expected to witness a geostrategic shift, India will aim at further strengthening its presence in the IOR. In this dynamic, India will look forward to building up the gambit with Indian Ocean littorals such as Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, and Seychelles to scrutinize the rise of China. Priyanjoli Ghosh. Ghosh works as a risk analyst. She focuses on politics and geopolitics and has worked on business continuity plans for clients in the oil and energy sector, professional services, insurance providers, and IT sector.
Her areas of interests are national security, maritime studies, diplomatic relations, and economic development. The views and opinions expressed or implied in JIPA are those of the authors and should not be construed as carrying the official sanction of the Department of Defense, Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, Air University, or other agencies or departments of the US government or their international equivalents.
See our Publication Ethics Statement. Skip to main content Press Enter. Related WBY Article. Strike Back! Related Documents. Conclusion As a move to strengthen itself at the IOR, India has increased its military capacity from operating only in the neighborhood to operating in the entire region—from the Malacca Strait to the waters off the African coasts.
Priyanjoli Ghosh Ms. If you wish to comment, use the text box below. AF reserves the right to modify this policy at any time. In the Atlantic, by contrast, winds blow in one direction all year round. This cosmopolitan world has long fascinated scholars and has become a vibrant domain of research. Yet this work has had little to say about the sea itself.
Its focus is on human movement with the ocean as a passive backdrop. Over the past few years, this situation has started to shift. In this article we survey both the older and the newer forms of Indian Ocean studies, of surface and depth. Given the long millennia of trade and exchange, one key concern of Indian Ocean studies has been a focus on cultural interaction. Cities on the shores have sustained deep forms of material, intellectual and cultural exchange, so that the denizens of these ports had more in common with each other than with their fellows inland.
The book contrasts the rigidity of borders in the s with the relative ease of movement in the late medieval Indian Ocean. The Swahili coast provides another famed example of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism.
Stretching a thousand miles from Somalia to Mozambique, Swahili society arose from centuries of interaction between Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Centred on coastal city states like Kilwa, Zanzibar and Lamu, Swahili trade networks reached far inland to present day Zimbabwe and outward to Persia, India and China.
After reaching their height from the 12th to the 15th centuries, these city states were eventually undone by the Portuguese, who arrived from the early 16th century, seeking to establish a monopoly of the spice trade. Central to these histories of mobility and exchange in the Indian Ocean has been the spread of Islam across land and sea from the 7th century CE.
By the 14th century, mercantile networks around the Indian Ocean were almost entirely in the hands of Muslim traders. In their wake came scholars, theologians, pilgrims, clerks, legal pundits and Sufi divines. Together, these groups created a shared economic, spiritual and legal frameworks. Sufism, a mystical form of Islam is an important strand in the Indian Ocean histories, as is the centrifugal power of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
When the Portuguese rounded the Cape in the late 15th century, they entered what many have termed a Muslim Lake, dominated in the north by the Turkish Ottoman, Persian Safavid and Indian Mughal empires. As Engseng Ho has indicated , these sprawling networks of Muslim commerce operated without the backing of an army or a state.
The Portuguese, Dutch and English in the Indian Ocean were strange new traders who brought their states with them. They created militarised trading-post empires in the Indian Ocean, following Venetian and Genoese precedents in the Mediterranean, and were wont to do business at the point of a gun. Early European entrants to the Indian Ocean world initially had to adapt to the trading orders that they encountered.
But by the 19th century, European empires dominated. Their military, transport and communication infrastructure intensified the movement of people across the Indian Ocean world.
0コメント