Interests and Values in India-Australia Strategic Nexus: Comparative Insights and Sustainable Pathways for Long-Term Collaboration

Abstract

This thesis provides a thorough understanding of the interests-values interplay utilised by India and Australia’s to enable their meta-narrative identity utilisation for revitalisation of strategic relations. It simultaneously illustrates the gaps in collaborative endeavours that need to be filled for ensuring the long-term sustainability of India-Australia strategic relations. By employing the strategic partnership framework developed by Wilkins (2008), it compares the India-Australia strategic partnership’s trajectory, with India-Russia and Australia-Japan strategic partnerships (their strongest strategic partnerships) along three phases, i.e., inception, implementation, evaluation. Theories of classical realism and constructivism have been integrated within inception and evaluation phases for scrutinising each partnership’s interests-values interplay. Findings reveal that India and Australia need to move beyond the pursuit of trade-related economic goals, and instead work towards bolstering security, people-to-people linkages. This would allow them to build mutual understanding, trust, and in turn sustain their strategic partnership by helping them in navigating through each other’s priorities, sensitivities.