A new scholarly overview released by Palgrave Macmillan examines how India’s foreign policy has evolved over roughly the past seven and a half decades, framing the changes as both conventional continuity and emerging adaptation. Titled “75 Years of India’s Foreign Policy: Bilateral, Conventional and Emerging Trends,” the book sets out to help readers trace the trajectories that shaped India’s geopolitical and geostrategic manoeuvres, while also highlighting dimensions that appear increasingly central to contemporary diplomacy. The work is organized into four broad sections, reflecting an intent to move beyond a single linear storyline and instead map how different approaches have come to coexist and compete over time.
According to the book’s description on SpringerLink, the volume aims to provide “frameworks” that allow readers to “map the course” of India’s foreign policy and its strategies. It suggests that understanding India’s external posture requires attention to multiple levels at once—bilateral relationships, the longer-standing norms and patterns that have historically guided policy, and newer trends that have been gaining prominence. In other words, the study does not treat India’s foreign policy as a static set of preferences; it presents change as an ongoing process shaped by international conditions and by India’s own evolving perception of its strategic environment.
The overview points to a core theme commonly associated with India’s post-independence diplomacy: the shift from non-alignment to “multi-engagement and beyond.” While the source snippet does not detail all arguments in the book, it signals that the research addresses how India’s approach to the world has broadened over time—from an emphasis on maintaining distance from major blocs to a more complex pattern of engagement. That transition is framed as an “evolving trajectory,” implying that the book treats non-alignment not merely as a past doctrine but as a starting point that later matured into wider diplomatic, economic, and strategic interactions.
Within the Springer description, the volume’s internal roadmap becomes visible through named sections and companion chapters that illustrate the type of issues the book tackles. The contents spotlight comparative perspectives under an “India and the World” theme, which includes discussions of India’s engagement in a “multiplex world.” One chapter title in the snippet—“India and the United States in the Multiplex World: Engagements, Equations and Complexities”—signals an effort to analyze the relationship not only in terms of politics, but also in terms of shifting calculations and interlocking interests.
Similarly, another highlighted heading—“The Dragon and the Tiger: A Review of Sino-Indian Relations in the Twenty-First Century World Order”—indicates that the book also addresses India’s northern neighbor in a structured, forward-looking way. The phrase “review” suggests not just a snapshot, but an assessment of how relations between India and China have been shaped by the broader “world order” of the twenty-first century. This framing, as shown in the snippet, places bilateral dynamics inside a larger systemic context rather than treating them as isolated disputes or discrete negotiations.
The study’s focus on bilateral, conventional, and emerging trends also implies a careful balancing act: acknowledging well-established elements of India’s foreign policy while demonstrating how new priorities and tools have increasingly come to the fore. That balancing is visible in the book’s stated purpose to “highlight some of the emerging dimensions” of India’s foreign policy. The use of plural—dimensions rather than a single transformation—signals that adaptation may be occurring across multiple domains, including diplomacy, security thinking, and engagement mechanisms.
Beyond the India-specific focus, the verified sources list includes current affairs and unrelated scientific and defence items, but they do not provide additional factual material about the Springer book’s internal claims. As such, this report confines itself strictly to the verified context supplied for the book description itself. The relevant facts available in that context are therefore centered on the book’s purpose, structure, and representative chapter themes rather than on any detailed data, case studies, or specific policy outcomes.
What the publication does provide, in the form of accessible bibliographic and descriptive information, is a clear indication of scholarly intent and scope. The authorship is associated with departments at Jadavpur University and Presidency University, both in Kolkata, and the Springer page records a high level of engagement with the title, noting “4923 Accesses” and “2 Altmetric,” suggesting the book has drawn attention among readers and tracked interest metrics.
In journalistic terms, the publication reads as an attempt to consolidate how India has positioned itself internationally across long time horizons. By emphasizing both “trajectories” and “emerging dimensions,” it acknowledges that policy is shaped by continuity and recalibration. And by framing engagement as moving from non-alignment toward multi-engagement and “beyond,” it situates India’s diplomatic evolution within changing global power configurations.
For policymakers, students, and analysts, the central takeaway from the Springer description is that India’s foreign policy over 75 years is best understood as layered: it includes bilateral relationships with key powers such as the United States and as well as system-level concerns that influence those bilateral equations; it includes the persistence of conventional approaches even as new methods and emphases gain prominence; and it includes an ongoing expansion of engagement patterns suited to a complex international environment.
The book’s design—divided into four broad sections and anchored by themes that range from U.S.-India relations to Sino-Indian dynamics—also suggests it will be useful as a reference point for readers seeking a structured entry into debates about how India’s strategic worldview has shifted. While the snippet does not spell out every argument, it makes one overarching promise: to provide a map of the course of India’s foreign policy, linking the country’s strategic manoeuvres to both the conventional foundations of its approach and the emerging realities that increasingly shape how it interacts with the world.
For now, the release on SpringerLink offers a timely synthesis of themes that have defined India’s external relations since independence, offering an academic lens through which to view the movement from a doctrine of distance toward a practice of diversified engagement—an evolution that the book frames as continuing, not finished.
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