Power asymmetry and competition in the Indo-Pacific: the island states of the Indian Ocean

At a time of growing polarization and competition, Darshana Baruah’s book The Contest for the Indian Ocean and the Making of a New World Order is an important contribution to understanding the importance of the Indian Ocean region in Indo-Pacific dynamics. The book considers the region through the perspective of its smaller powers, in particular the island states. According to Baruah, the Indian Ocean should not only be seen as a strategic continuum characterized by the need to protect sea lanes of communication and chokepoints vital to world trade where competition is only likely to intensify.

Rather, the Indian Ocean is also traversed by its own political and strategic dynamics that may in turn redefine great-power competition.

Baruah is one of many authors that state that competition with China will increase in the Indian Ocean, if for no other reason because of China’s dependency on both the region’s energy and raw materials and its connectivity with Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Europe. Nor is this book the first attempt to demonstrate the region’s relevance in today’s power competition, for which the author argues that the Indian Ocean will be the “key theater” (p. 11). But Baruah is certainly one of very few authors to analyze the role of island states in shaping the rapports de force in the region and, by extension, the larger Indo-Pacific. This effort of disaggregating the Indian Ocean as a complex ecosystem involving many actors in a situation of power asymmetry makes this book a significant addition to the literature on regional geostrategic dynamics.

Baruah’s main argument is that island states in the Indian Ocean are not passive objects in an ongoing larger-power competition. The recent history of this ocean region is the story of how small states gradually gained autonomy and independence from colonial and aspirant great powers alike, although with occasional ambivalence and hesitation regarding the nature of their desired relationships with the latter. Indeed, “it was island nations that sought support from bigger powers and neighbors to address evolving security issues within their own territories and environment” (p. 81).

Although these island states deny playing one actor off against another, they have been smartly using larger-power rivalry to their advantage. 

Comoros and the Maldives are two such examples. Comoros sees France as a partner but also, due to France’s claim to Mayotte, as a challenge to its sovereignty, and it has framed its other partnerships accordingly. China and Saudi Arabia, according to the author (as well as Russia, I would note), are also important political partners to Comoros at a time when relations between Paris and Beijing, on the one hand, and Paris and Moscow, on the other, are increasingly tense in Africa. Maldives has ostensibly diversified its political relations away from New Delhi by inviting Chinese aid to the archipelago to prevent it from over-reliance on any one country. It sees multilateral engagements and partnerships as a protection to its sovereignty. In the perspective of these states, “ ‘small islands have no choice but to foster strategic partnerships’ to balance bigger players interests around their waters” (p. 89).

This relatively new situation of being key to major-power interests has not necessarily allowed the island states to dictate the terms of their relationships with the larger powers but has certainly, initially at least, forced the latter to take their interests and logics into consideration. At a time when war is increasingly illegitimate as a way of achieving political objectives, the competition has proved to be one of offer, in which island states have usually gone for the biggest bidder in fields that ignored geostrategy but that they deem essential. In the process, infrastructure building, fighting climate change, and more generally, nontraditional security issues have grown to occupy a central place in the conversation between the developed states and the less-developed countries of the Indian Ocean. In that sense Baruah’s claim that the island states are reshaping great-power competition is true.

The emergence of new actors and the persistence of political fragmentation in the Indian Ocean region have facilitated this process.

Traditional players such as France, India, the United Kingdom, and even the United States are no longer alone in the Indian Ocean, nor in a position to dictate the terms of exchange in the regional relationships.

China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and others, including a resurgent Russia, are now alternative players in the region toward which island states could now turn.

Of particular interest is the articulation between traditional and nontraditional threats in the Indian Ocean region. The former, associated with military activities, used to define a space of mutually exclusive interests, linked mostly to the protection of sovereignty. The latter, on the contrary, was linked to the notion of common good and potential cooperation. The projection of continental conflicts at sea – including the China-India and India-Pakistan disputes, the Hamas-Israel war through the Houthis, and the importance of the Indian Ocean for the Taiwan issue – combined with the weaponization of almost all traditional maritime activities is gradually blurring the lines between the two threat types, adding complexity to an already intricate strategic landscape.

Given the book’s persuasive main argument, one may regret that the author might have occasionally generalized excessively some of the considerations. Chinese illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in the Indian Ocean is a reality, for example, but the ocean is not the South China Sea, and IUU fishing (and fisheries, more generally) does not have the same significance in both spaces. In the South China Sea, IUU fishing is a way for China to assert territorial claims that are nonexistent in the Indian Ocean. Fishing vessels there have at times “become a marker of presence and interest,” and economic interests may draw economic protection, but the challenge is of a different nature.

But more importantly, perhaps, it would have been interesting and useful if the book had more systematically measured the limits of island states’ agency.

Island states are often in the unenviable situation of being dependent on the technology of larger powers – maritime domain awareness technologies being a classic example – for the protection of resources that they sometimes blame the exploitation of on these same powers. This situation both contributes to the competition between larger powers by providing a cover to dual-use initiatives (p. 138) and introduces a structural contradiction in the autonomization of the island states that in turn partly shapes larger-power competition.

Overall, despite these quibbles, The Contest for the Indian Ocean is a welcome contribution to the understanding of not only the Indian Ocean region but the entire Indo-Pacific, where polarization is the new reality and one that is likely to be sustained in the coming decades. For the island states, ambivalence is likely to be the new posture. If these states have no interest in seeing either of the major regional disputes (China-United States or  China-India) degenerate into open conflict, polarization is also a blessing in disguise, allowing them to leverage their relations for material and statutory benefits, even if they risk losing themselves in the process, as demonstrated, for example, by the Sri Lankan case.

Highlighting this new reality is unquestionably the main value of The Contest for the Indian Ocean.

As the book implicitly and explicitly underlines, one can debate the capacity of the island states to truly change the nature of the competition between the great powers in the Indian Ocean and beyond, but not the need for these powers to change their approach to smaller states.