| Summary/Abstract |
India is emerging as a global power, but its strategic culture remains
largely understudied. Expert literature calls into question the very
existence of India’s own “systemic” strategic thinking. The article probes
into the validity of this viewpoint, postulates that India has its own
strategic culture, and highlights its key elements.
With the help of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, the genealogy
of the concepts of ‘war’ and ‘power’ in Indian political philosophy is
examined and, on this basis, the central conceptual elements of India’s
military-political system are determined.
This approach shows that India’s strategic culture is distinguished not only
by its own systemic strategic thinking, but also by an original (different
from the Western one) way of structuring and coding the conceptual space
of ‘society,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘statehood.’ This gives an idea of how war and
strategy were understood in Indian culture in the past and how they are
seen today.
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