ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the debate concerning US decline and emerging Asian powers, in particular India. The narrative of the US’s slow decline and India’s representation as a peaceful, stable rising power has been taken for granted among policy-makers in the Bush and Obama administrations. As a policy research institute, a think tank could provide different policy understandings and solutions. A few academic works within the think tank literature indeed theorize about the knowledge and narratives produced by think tanks, but less is done to combine this with a discourse analysis of an actual debate. This chapter investigates how the US and India were represented by the Brookings Institution from 2001 to 2016 as part of the larger declinist debate. The discourse analysis performed reveals the underlying narratives, such as the narrative of cooperation, that inform actors’ understanding of world politics. Also, the findings suggest the existence of a discourse coalition of politicians, the media, scholars, and think tanks which intertextually draw upon the same meanings and representations. Think tanks are often repeating and sometimes constructing narratives within the discourse coalition.
