India-LAC’s Relations at Crossroads: Emerging Powers in Polarized and Divided World Orders

The waves of market liberalization in the 1990s gave a momentum for India to develop new partnerships and strengthen its presence in changing world orders. Historically, neither India nor Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries were given top priority in foreign affairs by both sides. Nevertheless, following the Framework Agreement signed in June 2003, the Indian government signed the Preferential Trade Agreement in 2004 with MERCOSUR to set conditions for a free-trade area and to start negotiations. Nowadays, with the high rates of Indian economic growth, India and LAC became a key stakeholder for each.
The strengthened relations especially in economic areas has a potential of building and expanding pragmatic alignment in the unstable world that we have faced after the collapse of the USSR. As such, we seek to bring empirical insights especially in the areas of science, technology, and innovation; trade and investment; defence; sustainable development and combating poverty; governance; multilateral cooperation; and civil society exchanges.
To what extent did India’s LAC policies change in its focus given the country’s growing presence as an emerging power? If changed, in which policy cycles can such a change become most salient: agenda setting by domestic voters and/or foreign governments whose interests maybe at stake by new foreign policies; or policymaking by the Indian government? Moreover, could the external impact of authoritarian states such as China and Russia be considered to give a newer perspective on their respective roles in accelerating inclusive cooperation and competition across the two regions? And fundamentally, whether can such close relations between India-LAC lead the Global South to a more promising world politics?
To address these questions, this project focuses on three foreign policy fields: (1) India’s foreign economic policy towards Latin America with an in-depth analysis of Indo-LAC trade, investments :(2) India’s development cooperation policy vis-à-vis LAC, its principles, instruments, and volume; (3) India’s politico-diplomatic foreign policy vis-à-vis LAC, especially focusing on public health and energy and climate change, human rights and diaspora policies. Given the above questions and focused-policy issues, the project is open to any analytical approaches of both qualitative and quantitative methods.