Prime Minister Modi’s visits to Australia and New Zealand from 8 to 11 July 2026 mark a significant milestone in India’s engagement with the southern Indo-Pacific.
Can the Indo-Pacific remain strategically coherent if India is no longer central to it, and does the shift point to something deeper than a bureaucratic housekeeping exercise?
The ‘Indo-Pacific’ emerged through the convergence of Japan's long-term strategic reorientation towards India (‘Japan's India Shift’) and India's eastward engagement.
The 2016 arbitral ruling on the South China Sea in favour of the Philippines continues to shape maritime governance and strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.
The Quad Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in May 2026 underscored the Quad’s continuing relevance as a provider of regional public goods and services in the Indo-Pacific.
From an African perspective, literature on maritime security and the Indo-Pacific is very limited. Any discussion on Africa's inclusion and role in the Indo-Pacific discourse is at a nascent stage. The maritime security aspects and challenges facing African countries situated in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region have thus far not been adequately explored in the existing literature. The scholarly debates and international responses have tended to focus mostly on piracy in African waters. Piracy has sensitised both Africa and the international community to the threats off Africa, but it has also skewed perceptions about Africa's maritime landscape. Despite that, maritime security in an African context has been increasingly assuming prominence in the African security agenda. This monograph studies, analyses, and highlights the imperative for African countries in the WIO region to integrate themselves and play a constructive role in the emerging Indo-Pacific debate. It also attempts to find out the ways through which African countries in the WIO region could benefit by developing common positions on the Indo-Pacific based on shared interests and principles. Such a study is important because multilateralism matters for African states as it gives them the best chance to pool resources and ideas to influence global decisions and ensure that their voices are factored in discussions that have a bearing on the continent's growth and development.
Asia is the fulcrum of the Indo-Pacific. The “Asian Age” or the “Asian Century” in the era of the Indo-Pacific is being redefined as a broader concept signalling the inevitable rise of different parts of Asia, which are home to some of the world’s most ancient civilizations. For the past two decades, if not more, Asia has re-emerged to shape global dynamics by involving many stakeholders from the extended neighbourhood of Africa, West Asia, Eurasia as well as the great powers that have a long-standing economic and security stake in different parts of Asia. Asia is expected to generate more than 50 per cent of the world’s GDP by 2040, and could account for nearly 40 per cent of global consumption, ushering in the ‘’Asian Age’.
