Great-Power Rivalry in the Indian Ocean Weighs Heaviest on the Smallest States

The Indian Ocean has quietly become the most consequential body of water on the planet, and a new study argues that the great-power contest unfolding across its waters is redistributing risk in a way that few policymakers have fully appreciated. Writing in SN Social Sciences, Swapana S. Prabhu and Niranjan Mohapatra of Utkal University and Assam University advance a claim that is both simple and unsettling: external strategic competition in the Indian Ocean reconfigures maritime risk so that it falls most heavily on the states with the least fiscal and administrative capacity to absorb it, even while delivering genuine infrastructure and security benefits to those same countries. The finding challenges the conventional narrative in which small Indian Ocean states are portrayed merely as passive prizes in a larger game.

The study’s methodology is what sets it apart from much of the existing literature on the region. Rather than offering a country-by-country descriptive tour, the authors apply a narrative review of government and institutional documents, treaty texts and peer-reviewed publications, and then compare the strategic engagement of twelve major and middle powers alongside four small and island states on a consistent set of variables. This comparative table, the authors argue, allows claims about the regional order to rest on evidence rather than assertion. They also embed a human security and small-state agency perspective within the comparative analysis itself, rather than treating it as an afterthought, and they evaluate how economic exposure translates into chokepoint vulnerability and threats to human security.

The analytical stakes are enormous because of geography. The Indian Ocean links the world’s principal energy producers in the Persian Gulf to the largest consumers in East and South Asia, and it hosts several of the busiest maritime chokepoints on Earth, including the Strait of Hormuz and the sea lanes approaching the Strait of Malacca. According to data cited in the study from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and United Nations trade bodies, disruptions at these narrow passages ripple directly into global inflation and supply chains, as recent disturbances around Hormuz have demonstrated. Whoever secures, or threatens, these arteries holds leverage over the economic life of billions of people, which explains why navies from Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, Paris, London and beyond now patrol waters that were once considered distant from their core interests.

The historical sweep of the paper reminds readers that this attention is not new. From the rise of Islam through 1750, as the economic historian K.N. Chaudhuri documented, the Indian Ocean sustained a vast commercial civilisation of monsoon-driven trade long before European arrival. The age of empire then turned the ocean into a British lake, a dominance examined by scholars such as Ashley Jackson and John Darwin. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 dictum on the influence of sea power upon history, and K.M. Panikkar’s 1946 warning that Indian history had been shaped by neglect of the sea, framed the strategic anxieties that resurfaced after the Cold War, when superpower rivalry in the region, chronicled as early as the 1970s and 1980s, gave way to today’s multipolar contest.

What has changed is the number and variety of players. The study catalogues an extraordinary range of strategic engagements: the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy and the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom; China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its so-called string of pearls of ports and facilities, a concept first analysed by Gurpreet Khurana in 2008; India’s maritime security strategy and its expanding web of agreements, from a comprehensive strategic partnership with Australia to coast guard harbour development in the Maldives and a maritime rescue centre with Sri Lanka; France’s self-declared resident power role in the southwest Indian Ocean; Japan’s economic cooperation in the Middle East and Africa; and the growing naval ambitions of middle powers such as Türkiye, which is preparing its first aircraft carrier. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia have sought footholds, from a proposed Red Sea naval base deal to aid diplomacy across the region’s least developed countries.

Against this crowded field, the paper’s central mechanism comes into focus. Infrastructure loans, port construction, coast guard vessels, hydrographic surveys and security assistance all arrive with strategic strings attached, and the states that accept them, small island developing states such as the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Sri Lanka, gain real capabilities they could not otherwise afford. Yet the same dependence concentrates exposure. When external powers compete, the littoral states become arenas for base negotiations, debt leverage and diplomatic pressure, as the abandoned Chinese-linked project in the United Arab Emirates after American intervention illustrated. The authors’ testable proposition is that this competition does not distribute risk evenly: it accrues precisely where fiscal buffers, maritime domain awareness and regulatory control are thinnest.

The human security dimension sharpens the argument further. The study draws on research into coastal hazard vulnerability in India, post-disaster mobilities in small island developing states, and disaster risk reduction two decades after the Indian Ocean tsunami, to show that maritime insecurity is not only about warships. Non-traditional threats, including piracy, trafficking, illegal fishing, climate-driven displacement and the fragility of undersea communication cables, which Observer Research Foundation analyses have flagged as an underappreciated security domain, bear directly on livelihoods. For island states whose economies and very territories are exposed to rising seas, as adaptation studies from Mauritius demonstrate, the line between strategic competition and human survival is thin indeed.

The paper also engages with contested sovereignty questions that continue to shape the region’s legal geography. The International Court of Justice’s 2019 advisory opinion on the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, and subsequent negotiations over the archipelago’s future, show how decolonisation, base politics and great-power strategy remain entangled. Regional institutions such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association offer a forum for cooperation, but the authors suggest that minilateral groupings and middle-power diplomacy, examined in recent work on the region’s security architecture, are increasingly where the real bargaining happens.

Perhaps the study’s most policy-relevant conclusion is its reframing of stability itself. The authors argue that regional stability depends as much on maritime governance and economic cooperation as on the balance between great powers. In other words, more carrier groups and more basing agreements will not, by themselves, make the Indian Ocean safer. What is needed, on their account, is investment in the governance capacity of littoral states, so that the countries sitting on the world’s most valuable sea lanes are not also the ones least equipped to manage the risks that competition generates. That includes coordinated approaches to chokepoint security, debt transparency in port financing, and human-centred frameworks that treat fishermen, coastal communities and island populations as stakeholders rather than bystanders.

For a region that carries the bulk of intercontinental trade and the energy lifelines of Asia, the message of this analysis is a sobering one. The Indian Ocean’s geopolitical moment has arrived, celebrated in strategy documents from Delhi to Washington to Beijing, but the costs of that moment are being quietly externalised onto its smallest and most vulnerable members. Whether the coming decade produces a governed, cooperative ocean or a fragmented arena of competing spheres will depend, the study suggests, not on who wins the rivalry, but on whether the states that host it are finally given the tools to shape it.

Subject of Research: Geopolitical competition, maritime security and human security in the Indian Ocean region

Article Title: The Indian Ocean at the forefront of contemporary world geopolitics: a conceptual and policy analysis

Article References: Prabhu, S. S., & Mohapatra, N. (2026). The Indian Ocean at the forefront of contemporary world geopolitics: a conceptual and policy analysis. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 487. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01771-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01771-4

Keywords: Indian Ocean, geopolitics, maritime security, chokepoints, human security, small island states, Indo-Pacific, China-India rivalry, maritime governance, sea lines of communication, Belt and Road Initiative, strategic competition