This pioneering volume provides a systematic treatment of India's Gulf policy from multiple thematic and theoretical angles. It seeks to address the mismatch between the Gulf region's economic and security importance to India and the dearth of academic attention paid to India's Gulf policy. Although several books and articles have been published on India's relations with individual Gulf states, few if any offer systematic treatments of India's Gulf policy as a whole. This volume also seeks to reconcile the study of India's Gulf policy with the disciplinary debates and questions that underpin the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis. While much of the study of India's foreign policy remains atheoretical and isolated from broader theoretical and disciplinary conversations, this volume makes a conscious effort at bridging the divide. The editors have therefore conceived this volume as a collection of theoretically informed treatments of India's Gulf policy. The contributors were asked to consider and discuss the theoretical frames and methods that they employed in analysing the various aspects of India's Gulf policy. The volume, therefore, also serves as a practical guide for students of foreign policy analysis to applying theoretical and methodological tools to foreign policy.

The project was conceived in the course of Hasan T. Alhasan's doctoral work under the supervision of Harsh V. Pant at the India Institute at King's College London. The editors would like to thank the India Institute, the editors at Cambridge University Press, the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and various colleagues including Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad, Dr N. Janardhan, P. R. Kumaraswamy, Dr Melissa Levaillant, and A. K. Pasha for their support and encouragement. Hasan is particularly indebted to HRH Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and the Crown Prince's International Scholarship Programme for the generous financial support of his doctoral studies without which his work on this volume would not have been possible.