Navigating the Sino-Indian power struggle in the Indian Ocean: the case of Sri Lanka

Abstract

China and India's competition and power struggle in the Indian Ocean is the new geopolitical reality. The arrival of an extra-regional power and India's concern of a Chinese presence has given Sri Lanka leverage in realizing its domestic and foreign policy goals, and relative bargaining power in convincing New Delhi to realize its interests. Meanwhile China card has posed challenges. Colombo’s strategy vis-à-vis this dynamic is influenced by domestic and international compulsions. By adopting bandwagon, balancing and strategic hedging strategies of small states, this paper evaluates how Sri Lanka navigated the power struggle during 2005–2019. This period marks a major shift in the international attention towards the Indian Ocean and therefore to the island nation. The paper concludes that as power struggle has intensified India and China's engagement in Sri Lanka, it has also allowed Sri Lanka to realize its own goals and objectives.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.