S Jaishankar Phd Thesis ((full)) Jun 2026

In his thesis, Jaishankar critiqued the rigid non-alignment of the 1960s as being too passive. Today, his "multi-alignment" is the direct descendant of his PhD argument. He believes India should align with the US for technology, Russia for defense, and the Global South for legitimacy.

At its heart, Jaishankar’s thesis tackled a central dilemma of the Cold War era: could the superpower logic of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) be applied to a regional context like South Asia? He argued that it could not be transplanted directly. Unlike the US-USSR dyad, which was characterized by geographical distance and ideological parity, the India-Pakistan-China triangle was marked by proximity, asymmetry in conventional forces, and low-intensity conflict. Jaishankar posited that deterrence in this “regional context” was inherently more fragile and crisis-prone. He introduced the concept of a "minimum credible deterrent"—not as a static arsenal, but as a dynamic political tool designed to prevent escalation while preserving space for diplomacy. This was a distinctly Indian realist argument: nuclear weapons were not instruments of war-winning, but of war-prevention in a hostile neighborhood. s jaishankar phd thesis

Dr. S. Jaishankar , India's External Affairs Minister, completed his PhD in International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), specializing in Nuclear Diplomacy Samvada World In his thesis, Jaishankar critiqued the rigid non-alignment

, a subject that remains at the core of global power dynamics today. In his work, he explored: Samvada World The complex "art and craft" of geopolitical negotiation At its heart, Jaishankar’s thesis tackled a central

By the 1970s, Western scholarship (largely American) argued that states act primarily based on the international "system" (e.g., the Cold War binary). Indian scholarship, conversely, often leaned on "unit level" factors (e.g., Nehru’s ideology, domestic politics).