ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, Introduction, outlines the rationale of this book’s investigation of Indian identity and world order conceptions. It shows that the ‘rise’ of non-Western powers such as China and India has drawn increasing scholarly, policy and media attention in the last two decades and triggered a debate about the implications of this ‘power shift’ for the Western-liberal world order. Against this backdrop, there has been increasing interest in the worldviews of these so-called rising powers, both as an alternative to the largely Western-centrist discipline of International Relations, and because these countries are believed to soon have the necessary power capacities to promote their respective conceptions of world order. The chapter will then outline the book’s theoretical approach which builds on the discourse-theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and poststructuralist IR scholarship. This theoretical approach foregrounds the notions of discourse, identity and hegemony and focusses on the ways in which discourses constitute meanings and identities by relating differences and seek to hegemonize particular understandings of the world.
